Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from BU's Mayrotra Institute

that explores questions like, why are executives paid so much? Do they deserve it? Listen wherever

you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. This is on podcasts, Boston.

This is On Point.

I'm Deborah Becker in for Magna Chakra-Bardi.

In universities throughout the U.S., scientists conduct vast amounts of research that is now under threat as the Trump administration seeks to, quote, reclaim elite universities. One example of this is Harvard's work on a microchip, the size of a USB thumb drive

that can simulate a human organ system. It's called a human organs on chip, and it promises to accelerate drug discovery

and help personalize medical treatments by imitating human organs.

If it's a lung, we could have air and breathing motions. If it's intestine, you have

peristaltic-like motions. And these devices, the cells, the way we position them, recreate the structure of

the living tissues in our organs. And as a result, we mimic human organ-level responses to drugs,

toxins, and radiation. That's Don Engber, founding director of the Vise Institute for Biologically

Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and a professor of vascular biology at Harvard Medical

School. He helped develop these chips. Recently, he had been using them to study radiation

exposure during cancer treatments. And Engber says the federal agency overseeing the work was enthusiastic.

Just the week earlier, they were so positive about the advances we were making,

developing ways to identify drugs to prevent radiation injury, that they were asking us to come

up with a small proposal or what they call an add-on

with additional funding to expand what we were doing to another area.

When he says they, Professor Engber is talking about the biomedical advanced research

and development authority, or Barda, as it's called.

That's the federal agency that helps fund his work.

...