By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza

Dec. 18, 2025

AAlex Bates was lying on her couch on a Friday afternoon when her phone began blowing up. It was a moment she and her colleagues had spent years preparing for: James Watson had died. When she joined the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2019 as the head of its communications office, how the agency should discuss its former director — an icon of biology for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA — was one of the first things she was charged with tackling.

Tucked away on a government server were drafts of opinion pieces, talking points its scientists could make in interviews, and a statement from the agency’s director. This elaborate PR campaign was prepared for two reasons: Watson had been a powerful advocate for the Human Genome Project and its first director, and was, quite literally, the reason NHGRI existed. But Watson’s unrepentant beliefs in scientific racism and sexism, which had poisoned his own legacy, wouldn’t die with him. If anything, they were making a comeback.

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Even before President Trump’s return to power illuminated a new wave of racist, anti-immigrant, transphobic sentiments, eugenic ideas and rhetoric had been ramping up in the U.S., driven by anxieties about low birth rates and the arrival of genetic technologies that promise prospective parents new powers of offspring “optimization.” Amid this resurgence, NHGRI’s leadership had taken a public stance against scientific racism and eugenics — driven by the technologies’ dubious evidence and ethics, and their potential to discourage historically marginalized groups from participating in genomics research, threatening the future of personalized medicine.

This is part 9 of American Science, Shattered The series looks at how the Trump administration has disrupted labs, upended lives, and delayed discoveries. Read the series

But when Watson died in November at age 97, NHGRI did not put out any of the materials Bates and her team had prepared. There was no one left in its communication office to do that. Bates and everyone who had worked there, along with the entirety of NHGRI’s education and outreach offices, had been fired months before as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restructure the federal government.

“It was like the football game was finally happening and we were not on the field,” Bates said with a sigh. “We were all disappointed, because we had done so much work to try to not only prep statements on Watson, but to communicate the background noise to the problem. That’s not just Watson, but a problem inherent in science and genetics and genomics: the history of eugenics and the history of bigotry.”

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While the Watson example is particularly thorny, it is but one of many instances this year of federal research agencies pulling back from fostering public discussions — in part because of changing politics, but also because of the hollowing out of the offices where that once happened.

At the National Institutes of Health, big changes to its communications operations were already underway before Trump’s return to the White House. But the new administration scrapped those carefully laid plans in favor of haphazard downsizing. In January, more than 600 people worked in communications offices spread across the NIH. Today, there are fewer than 100. Officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., justified the deep cuts as reducing “administrative bloat,” and promised that consolidating those functions would make agencies more responsive.

But there was no restructuring plan, NIH employees told STAT. Instead, the staff who survived the RIFs have been overwhelmed with trying to continue to tell the public about science happening inside NIH and undertake an ambitious website consolidation project, all while figuring out how to build a new, centralized communications apparatus from scratch. “They’re well-meaning, but they’re not up to the task,” said one senior NIH official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Without sufficient staffing, millions of pages of NIH websites aren’t being maintained, effectively frozen in time, even as research advances. Lab websites aren’t being updated with new publications, and employees who work with external scientists can’t communicate in a timely way with their various research communities. Outdated staff pages mean outside scientists and other members of the public sometimes get four or five bounced emails before they reach someone who still works there.

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Popular NIH blogs and newsletters have also gone dark. Cancer Currents, a weekly news blog produced by the National Cancer Institute that for more than 10 years has provided the public with updates on clinical trials, research findings, and drug approvals, ceased production in May. Around the same time, the National Institutes of Aging stopped sending out its newsletters about dementia research, clinical trials for Alzheimer’s drugs, and science-backed tips on healthy aging. At the Center for Scientific Review, which now runs all of the peer evaluations of grant proposals at NIH, a blog that regularly informed the research community of changes in the review process was last updated in October 2024.

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Another change: For the first time, there is a political appointee in the NIH communications operations, located in the media office of the NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya. Press releases and media interviews, which always had to be cleared through HHS, now receive an extra layer of political scrutiny at NIH as well. Journalists, who once emailed with NIH staff, are now required to send questions through an online form that goes to political appointees at HHS. Between these changes and staffing cuts, the NIH has become less responsive, not more, both to the needs of its own scientists to get information out, and to members of the public eager to receive it.

NIH communications with the public fell sharply in 2025, according to a STAT analysis of press releases, media advisories, and research updates published on each institute or center’s website. STAT found that communications output dropped 70% to 90% at the majority of NIH institutes compared to the previous five years. A few fell off less significantly; others produced zero communications this year. Even the NIH central communications office, which did not experience mass layoffs, decreased its output by 60%, partly impacted by the six-week government shutdown this fall.

These losses have garnered little attention compared to grant terminations, purges of advisory bodies, crackdowns on international collaborations, and other actions taken by the Trump administration over the past 11 months to impose conservative political views on the U.S. research enterprise. But given the current crisis in public trust in both government and in science, no less troubling is the tearing down of the very tools best suited to address it: namely, clear and frequent communication.

Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon did not answer detailed questions from STAT about reduced public communications and the centralization at the NIH, but issued a statement saying the agency “is modernizing the largest website footprint in HHS, building on long-standing work and using a structure that supports consistent improvement across the agency.” Recent investments and engagement across the NIH “have strengthened the foundation for a more unified and efficient web presence, creating momentum for enterprise-wide updates,” he added.

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STAT interviewed 10 former and five current NIH employees involved with communications activities, many of whom asked for anonymity for fear of retribution from the federal government. This story is also based on more than 100 internal NIH emails, memos, and other documents obtained by STAT. Together, they present a case study of how the Trump administration’s efforts to centralize power into the hands of political appointees at NIH have eviscerated subject matter expertise and throttled public information-sharing about important advances in health research.

Eric Green (right), director of NHGRI from 2009-2025, poses with other scientists at a 1993 conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, when he was an assistant professor and co-investigator at the Human Genome Center at Washington University.NIH/NHGRI

What is being lost at NHGRI

Perhaps the best place to understand what is being lost, and what’s at stake, is at the genome institute. A congressional mandate to communicate with the public is uniquely written into its founding charter, an obligation it fulfilled through its designated education and community involvement branch. It’s also the only institute dedicated not to an organ or a disease, but to a molecule. And not just any molecule, but one suffused with the entire history of all the humans that have ever lived on planet Earth and all the potential futures for the generations of humans still to come. The study of DNA can thus never simply be about the genes someone inherits, but must include the stories societies tell about the meaning of that inheritance.

For centuries, scientists have been hypnotized by the questions of how, and why, humans differ. The Human Genome Project, by deciphering the sequence of genetic “letters” in our DNA a quarter century ago, promised to provide some answers, and in so doing root out the genetic causes of disease and improve the health of all humans. But over the last decade and a half, modern geneticists have had to confront the possibility that their work, rather than finally interring the myth of race as a biological category, has instead perpetuated it, and even added fuel to the resurging fires of scientific racism.

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Under the leadership of Eric Green, before he was ousted in March, NHGRI had become a steward of social issues surrounding genetics, confronting those legacies head-on. He hired an archivist to digitize and make available to the public all the records from the Human Genome Project, and a historian of eugenics to parse that past to better understand the present. He invested in education and outreach teams to create an accessible glossary of genomic terms and other resources for teachers and physicians. He built out a team of 20 science writers, illustrators, and web developers, and a videographer to keep new content constantly flowing, including livestreamed NHGRI events and easy-to-understand videos for YouTube, X, and Instagram.

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Today, none of those people work at NHGRI. Without them, there are no public events, no new videos. Genome.gov, historically one of the most popular websites across the federal government, drawing millions of views a day to its glossary and other scientific resources, is not being updated. Plans to release plain-language genetics education materials to thousands of classrooms at community colleges, Indigenous universities, and other academic institutions were abruptly halted. And without the education branch, it appears NHGRI is now failing to meet its congressional mandate to communicate advances in genomic science to the public, current employees told STAT.

Eric Green, former NHGRI director, during an interview at the American Society for Human Genetics conference in Boston in October.Lucy Lu for STAT

The archives are also currently unavailable to scholars, journalists, or curious members of the public. Green said he’s been promised it’s all being backed up. But nobody can access it because there’s no one left to arrange it. “All they had to do was just leave one person,” he told STAT in a recent interview. “That’s taxpayer-funded science and history. Let’s talk about waste, fraud, and abuse, right?”

Zach Utz, who served as the program’s archivist from 2018 until he was laid off in April, said there is still plenty to glean from the archives, such as the behind-the-scenes communication between scientists at the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics, a private company that competed with the HGP. At the time, the rivalry was pitched as a microcosm of competition between the private and public sector. “But when you look at the details,” Utz said, “Celera was using all of this public data that was being generated by the HGP, and just recycling it, basically putting it into their project, and building off of that foundation.” He was nearly done creating a museum exhibition about this dynamic, using materials from the archive, before his contract was terminated.

“Being willfully neglectful of preserving the past is just insane to me, as a historian and as somebody that values the preservation of that kind of data and information,” said Utz. After he wrote about his concerns about preserving the archive in a STAT opinion piece, the NIH’s history office reached out to him. A staffer thanked him for bringing the issue to their attention, and asked a series of technical questions about how to best preserve the work Utz and others had done, he said.

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With eugenic ideas resurging in the halls of American political power and artificial intelligence supercharging an emerging genetic embryo-screening industry selling a future where children can be optimized before they are even born, outside scientists who study the societal impacts of genomics told STAT that the hollowing out of NHGRI’s communication and education programs comes as nuanced and fact-based conversations about the science, history, and ethics of genomics are more important than ever.

Zach Utz, who served as a NHGRI archivist until being laid off in April, poses with Bates at the 2025 ASHG conference.Lucy Lu for STAT

“It’s terrifying to see all of that being lost,” said Jennifer Reardon, a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Reardon is currently living in Germany, researching a book about Nazi race science and the origins of antiracist efforts to condemn it. Despite those efforts, race science quickly resumed in Germany after the end of World War II.

“It didn’t just go away; genomics has inherited that,” Reardon said. “And so, if you take the thin structures we created to try to mitigate against that, and you take them all down, then don’t be surprised if all that stuff just has free range again. History would lead you to think that is what would happen.”

Francis Collins, then director of NHGRI, announced at a 2003 NIH press conference that a six-country consortium had largely completed mapping the human genome.via Getty Images

Priceless papers from the Human Genome Project

Francis Collins — who succeeded Watson as the leader of the Human Genome Project and NHGRI before becoming head of the NIH over 12 years and three presidencies — has been accused of many things. But being overly organized is not one of them. Which is kind of ironic for a man who managed to marshal thousands of scientists from across the globe to assemble a three-billion-piece genetic puzzle in what was, at the time, the most ambitious group science project since the moon landing. Scientifically, his colleagues say, he was always two steps ahead. Logistically, not so much.

So on a Friday afternoon in May 2008, on Collins’ last day as NHGRI director, Green was not exactly surprised to get this text from Collins:

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“Eric, I’m in trouble.”

The trouble was that Collins had left packing up his office to the last minute, and now, as he began to open drawers, he found them stuffed to the gills with years worth of handwritten notes, photographs, and documents from the Human Genome Project. Collins knew the papers were priceless — a record of an initiative that was transforming the rules of research and changing the practice of medicine. But there were too many of them and not enough time before his building access expired.

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Green, then NHGRI’s scientific director, had just acquired a new scanner. He told Collins to pack what he could. And on the following Monday, he and an assistant retrieved the boxes and set about digitizing their contents onto DVDs.

It was a lot. But it wasn’t the end. Months later, when Green moved into the director’s office, he found more drawers. Then a file cabinet around the corner. And another down the hall. All full. He realized he needed backup. Chris Donohue, a Ph.D. history of physics student who had researched Nazi race science and eugenics, answered the call. By 2014, when they formally launched the History of Genomics Program, the archive had grown to more than 1 million digitized documents detailing how the architects of the Human Genome Project had made decisions, faced setbacks, stoked rivalries, and debated issues both technical and ethical.

The history program — housed within NHGRI’s communications office to facilitate a constant dialogue between the science of the present with the lessons of the past — represented a significant shift toward a more open reckoning with the darker aspects of genomic research. Under Collins, the institute had avoided weighing in on efforts to use the new science of DNA to bolster old, discredited beliefs about biological mechanisms, rather than discriminatory social structures, driving racial differences in IQ test scores. Communication efforts were focused instead on basic genetic literacy — equipping the public with scientific terms and concepts around the connections between genes and health and disease. When Green took over as director in 2009, he changed that.

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Collins, a former NIH director, sings during a Stand Up for Science 2025 rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in March.Alex Wong/Getty Images

He felt his field needed to stop running from its past and address societal issues in genomics. “No matter how much we may have wanted to say ‘genomics, genomics, genomics,’ to get away from anybody mixing it up with eugenics, genomics carries the legacy of eugenics, and we can’t escape it,” he said. “And therefore there’s mistrust.”

This approach found an audience. In December 2021, more than 1,000 people tuned into a two-day virtual event focused on eugenics and scientific racism organized by NHGRI’s communications office. It followed that up the next year with a virtual symposium about genomics, disability, and ableism. Green, who tweeted prolifically from @NHGRI_Director, was outspoken on the platform about advertising the events and NHGRI’s commitment to fostering an inclusive and welcoming genomics community and society. And mostly, this stance was met with encouragement, or, at the very least, indifference online.

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That changed after Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed its name to X, and ditched features intended to limit misinformation and hate speech. Last summer, NHGRI’s communications office cohosted a symposium titled “Exploring the Many Dimensions of Sex and Gender in the Genomics Era,” which was attended by a few vocal anti-trans activists. After they were removed from the event for asking questions about why panelists rejected a definition of biological sex based on the kind of gamete (sperm or egg) a person is able to produce, they took to X to complain in a series of posts that garnered half a million views and hundreds of responses, including some that complained of censorship and cancel culture, and called for the dismantling of agencies like NIH to be replaced with “the right people.”

It was a totally new level of vitriol that surprised Bates. At the time, she wondered if it had something to do with an algorithm change on the platform. But it soon became clear that the change was bigger than some back-end tweak to X’s codebase. NHGRI quickly found itself squarely in the new administration’s crosshairs.

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Making lists of things to scrap

For the communications staff at the NIH, the Trump administration began not with a bang, but with deafening silence. The day after the inauguration, the acting Health and Human Services secretary issued a gag order, isolating the nation’s health agencies from the outside world. Over the following weeks, the tenor of communications meetings at NHGRI went from mundane and slow to chaotic, according to interviews with staff and meeting notes reviewed by STAT.

On the week of Jan. 17, staff was discussing responses to media inquiries, new fact sheets, getting Green new “fits” to film episodes of his online video series, “Way Cool Genomics.” Just a week later, talk turned to Trump’s executive order directing agencies to abolish all DEI activities and how they should respond. They made lists of things to scrap, including DEI-related pages from the agency’s internal website, videos from the internet, and a NHGRI leadership award for creating career development opportunities for researchers from all backgrounds.

Under Eric Green, NHGRI was committed to educating the public about science using video explainers — including a series featuring Green called “Way Cool Genomics” — and other means of accessible communication.

There was particular concern about how the institute should address “diversity” in the context of genomics. DEI initiatives used in hiring aim to boost representation from historically marginalized groups, typically by race. But genomic diversity means something entirely different; it refers to the millions of places that one individual’s DNA differs from another’s. Efforts to collect more genomes — to increase the diversity of genomic databases — are critical for ensuring the accuracy of genetic risk tests for things like cancer and Alzheimer’s as well as for uncovering novel protective genes that can unlock new medicines for everyone.

NHGRI has been a large funder of such efforts, like the 1,000 Genomes Project, All of Us, and the assembly of a reference pangenome, which so far have not been cut. But last winter, outside researchers were panicked about the future of these programs, and the NHGRI comms office was inundated with questions. Throughout February, staff were mostly unable to respond because all public communication had to be signed off on by the acting director of NIH at the time, Matthew Memoli. And very little got through.

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While it was unable to communicate with the outside world, NHGRI staffers turned their focus to making the case for their institute to the new administration. They laid out how and why genetics could fit into the new administration’s portfolio to “Make America Healthy Again.” In one memo, communications staff outlined how the institute’s work was already making people healthier — through cancer tumor sequencing, diagnosing rare diseases, drug development, and the potential for more population screening.

In mid-March, as the communications freeze was largely lifted, NHGRI’s staff were roiled by the ouster of Green, followed a week later by acting director Vence Bonham Jr., who had started the NHGRI’s education branch in the early 2000s and whose research focused on disparities in access to genomic medicine. Federal Register notices, correspondence with elected officials, public communications, and public speaking were allowed to resume with oversight. But the lay of the land was clearly different: Materials for the public would now need to be vetted by presidential appointees, in a process that one current NIH employee described as “jumping a long-standing institutional firewall.”

Also around this time, Bates was contacted by the office of the NIH director to provide feedback for a plan to centralize communications functions. The NIH is unique among federal science agencies in that it’s both one entity and a federation of 27 semi-autonomous institutes and centers. While a decentralized system, where each institute had the independence to set its own scientific priorities, historically worked well for funding research, having 27 different offices devoted to interfacing with the public was, in the words of one current NIH communications employee, “very cumbersome.”

Because each institute had set up its own website, each one has its own look and feel and underlying data structures. Someone coming to the NIH to look for information about autism is likely to get routed to websites for three separate institutes, all of which fund research on autism.

During the Covid pandemic, especially, NIH communications staff realized how hard it could be for the public to locate the information they needed. So in 2022, the NIH began to develop its first-ever, five-year strategic communications plan for all institutes, led by then-director of communications Renate Myles. After assembling working groups and conducting surveys and one-on-one interviews with institute leaders, Myles’ group came up with a plan to dramatically streamline the NIH’s digital presence — paring down the more than 700 NIH-owned websites to just one per institute. “We really understood that we need to be better in harmonizing our content and simplifying our footprint to make it easier to find stuff,” Myles said in an interview.

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Thoughtfully consolidating the NIH’s millions of web pages without losing anything important was going to take time — one internal estimate placed it at nearly 100,000 person-hours. Some of the institutes were just beginning the process when word came down from the new administration that HHS intended to centralize communication functions across agencies. Myles was given three days to put together a plan. She proposed accelerating the consolidation efforts underway and shrinking the overall communications apparatus while maintaining its longstanding hub-and spoke model. Allowing each institute to maintain staff would help them continue to exercise some autonomy as well as preserve subject-matter expertise. Memoli was supportive, Myles said, and sent it up the chain of command. But within a week it was rejected.

“The next thing I know there’s a RIF list and nearly everyone is on it,” Myles recalled. Most of the institutes lost the entirety of their communications offices. Communications at the NIH central office, under the director, were left untouched, except for Myles, who was put on administrative leave and offered a post in the Indian Health Service.

“The cuts were made without consideration of what skills would be needed to ensure continuity of critical communication services,” she said. “They seemed to primarily be trying to manage the many communication streams coming out of NIH.”

At NHGRI, the layoffs also hit the institute’s education and community involvement branch. The team there had been working on a major website update, including an interactive media project that explored the science behind how genes and the environment interact to impact health and behavior. It was scheduled to go live later that spring. Instead, it was shelved. NHGRI had also co-sponsored two-year fellowships to support early-career scientists interested in genomics communication, policy, and education. Those, too, came to an early and abrupt end.

For 25 years, NHGRI’s communications arm was among the largest of any NIH institute’s. Building that voice was difficult; federal agencies tend to be conservative in how much they say, given the weight it carries. “Our office was especially open about things, and I think as a result, NHGRI has been dismantled almost even more than other institutes have,” Bates said.

Visitors look at posters being presented at the 2025 ASHG conference at the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center in Boston.Lucy Lu for STAT

Eugenic ideas are reemerging in force

In October, the American Society for Human Genetics hosted in Boston one of the largest gatherings of DNA nerds on the planet — five days of poster sessions, talks, and opportunities for 10,000 scientists from more than 50 countries to connect. For three decades, NHGRI had been a pillar of these annual meetings. Not this year. The only signs of it were a few pieces of paper, tacked up on empty poster boards or taped to bare tables in a vacant square of the bustling expo floor, explaining that due to the government shutdown, this talk, this poster, this booth would not be happening.

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On the second night of the meeting, Green was honored with a leadership award. His speech, delivered to a packed auditorium, was characteristically energetic and forward-looking — filled with advice about how to lead with curiosity and empathy. The only moment Green faltered was as he recognized the 75 employees missing from the meeting. “This award really is as much about them as it is about me, and not having them here in this room is like rubbing salt into my already deep 2025 professional wound,” he said, his voice cracking. “And I’m sure that all of you recognize that the way NHGRI, NIH, and frankly all federal workers are being treated is just plain wrong. And in the case of NIH, it’s inflicting substantial damage worldwide.”

As Green finished, and the room rose for a standing ovation, Neil Risch, a genomics researcher at UC San Francisco and a past ASHG president, was the first to his feet. For him and many others in the audience, it felt like a passing-of-the-torch moment. But to whom, and for what, still seems uncertain.

“There’s a lot of infrastructure there, and I think if that survives, the institute will survive,” Risch said. But he worries about the integrity of the process for hiring a new NHGRI director, and about the political pressure whoever winds up in that role will face. “We just don’t know how genomics is viewed by the current administration,” he said.

NIH Director Bhattacharya and other science agency officials appointed under Trump have yet to directly address where genomics research sits in terms of priorities for funding. But Trump himself has been very vocal about what role he believes a person’s DNA plays in determining both their behavior and their value.

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, flanked (from left) by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, President Trump, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., delivers remarks during an announcement about children’s health in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in September.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

While railing against immigration on a conservative talk radio show last year, Trump falsely claimed that the Biden administration had admitted 13,000 migrants convicted of homicide. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” he went on. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” At a rally in 2023, he said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In 2020 while visiting the town of Bemidji, Minn., a city that’s 80% white, Trump told the crowd that they had “good genes.” “A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” he said. “The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different?”

The president’s language underscores a larger movement of eugenic ideas back toward the mainstream. Another place they’re showing up is in the emergence of a new technology that claims to give parents more informed choices about what kinds of children to have. Which makes now a particularly fraught moment for NHGRI to lose its voice.

Polygenic embryo selection offers a way for wealthy couples undergoing IVF to sequence the DNA of each of their embryos and get a prediction for how the unique genetic combinations of each embryo will translate into any resulting children’s lifetime risk of various complex conditions. When the first polygenic embryo selection companies launched a few years ago, they mostly stuck to making predictions about health issues like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and schizophrenia. More recently, some have begun scoring embryos based on forecasts for other complex traits, like height, eye color, intelligence, and even longevity.

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Daphne Martschenko, a bioethicist at Stanford University who studies the social impacts of polygenic embryo selection, sees the technology as the latest incarnation of a long-simmering eugenics ethos in America, now repackaged in the language of parental empowerment. Prior to Trump’s election, it seemed like the next ethical quagmire for the genomics field, and she was heartened to see NHGRI tackle it through hosting roundtable discussions and funding research into its public risks and benefits. Now, she worries that the diminishment of NHGRI as a training ground for the next generation of geneticists and a vocal counterweight to this rising tide of eugenic sentiment may have long-lasting consequences.

“There is a vacuum that is opening up, and I’m not sure how we close it; I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to close it,” Martschenko said. “And if we can’t close it at a time when we already have so little regulation of genomic technologies, it almost certainly guarantees that these technologies will further widen social inequalities.”

Ethics aside, researchers have been skeptical of companies’ claims about the tests, warning that while the statistics behind polygenic scores can help explain some trait variation within a population of people, they’re underpowered to predict individual outcomes. In a statement last year, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics said the use of polygenic risk scores for embryo selection had “moved too fast with too little evidence.”

But that hasn’t stopped companies — backed by tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, Alexis Ohanian, and Brian Armstrong — from marketing these tests as a way for couples to “genetically optimize” their growing families. This trend started in Silicon Valley, a hotbed of pronatalist and self-optimization obsession, with companies like Orchid and Nucleus, both founded and led by former Thiel fellows. It has gained wider exposure as tech elites have risen to new heights of political influence in Trump’s Washington.

Earlier this month, Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi touted his company’s $30,000 DNA screening service on “CBS Mornings,” which typically reaches up to 2 million viewers. Sadeghi has denied accusations of eugenics. But at least one other company, Herasight, has openly courted such controversy as part of its launch out of stealth this year with a $50,000 embryo selection product. In a paper published in October, several Herasight employees wrote that they reject framing “eugenics” as a “kind of curse word to label and condemn anything that involves genetic explanations of behavior, or preferences by parents for certain genetically-influenced traits.“

The arrival of newly brazen companies like Herasight drives home how much attitudes seem to be shifting. A 2023 poll of 1,400 Americans found that 72% of respondents approved the use of polygenic embryo screening for health traits, though only 36% approved of selecting for behavioral traits.

”Now is the time to be proactive and try to put some guardrails on,” Martschenko said. “Now would be the time, before there is a huge uptake of this technology, before there are hundreds of companies offering this service rather than 10.”

But the chief venues for convening people to talk about what to do about polygenic embryo screening had been at the NIH, and NHGRI in particular, in offices that “have now gone to sleep,” Collins, the former NIH director, said in an interview. That’s allowed companies to make their claims more boldly — making the rounds on podcasts, and even plastering advertisements across the New York City subway. “In a more normal time this kind of development would have attracted a lot of government and academic attention; but everybody’s so distracted now, and the engine for putting together a careful ethical and policy response has sand in its gears.”

NHGRI employees were absent from the ASHG conference in Boston, held during the government shutdown. Informal signs like this one were a common site at the convention center.Lucy Lu for STAT

‘Then things fell apart’

Today, Silicon Valley is the intellectual center of the modern U.S. eugenics movement. Two hundred years ago, that would have been the University of Virginia. In 1824, UVA recruited Thomas Jefferson’s personal physician, Robley Dunglison, whose extensive studies of the human body would later earn him the title of the “Father of American Physiology.” These studies included the dissection of Black people’s bodies in UVA’s anatomical theater — part of an effort to advance Jefferson’s ideas that supposed racial differences in “faculties of reason and imagination” could be quantified using the practice of comparative anatomy.

Not far from where that building once stood, Douglas Taylor teaches hundreds of undergraduate students each year about this dark chapter in the university’s history. It’s part of a semester-long course called “The DNA Revolution,” which explores the technologies that undergird modern genetics and the legal and ethical dilemmas that come with it. And if not for the cuts to NHGRI’s communications office, it’s a class that would have become available to thousands of students across the country.

Taylor, who’s head of the biology department at UVA, started the class eight years ago, to help non-science majors navigate living in an era of genetic self-knowledge. In 2022, Green came on as a co-instructor. Pretty quickly, he started to feel that the kinds of discussions the students were having were too important to keep inside the walls of Gilmer Hall. With Taylor willing to share his materials, Green threw the weight of NHGRI behind pushing the course out into the wider world. He hired a curriculum development company to make the course exportable and charged NHGRI’s education and outreach teams with finding teachers willing to try it in their own classrooms.

For the past decade, NHGRI had been building a network of genomics educators — at big-name research universities, but also at community colleges, tribal colleges, HBCUs, and high schools — that it had supported with trainings, teaching materials, and other resources. Former education branch staffers told STAT that at the start of the year, that network had grown to 250 faculty partners, who were poised to start piloting the course in 2026 before scaling it up nationwide. But when 60% of the branch was fired in the February round of probationary worker layoffs, and the rest were RIF’d in April, there was no one left to push it out. When NHGRI was directed by the Trump administration to cut 35% of its contracts, the curriculum development agreement was terminated.

“We were just gathering momentum to really make some big impacts,” said Elizabeth Tuck, NHGRI’s education branch chief who was laid off in April. “Then things fell apart. That’s the part that is particularly painful to me.”

On a recent Thursday, Zooming into Gilmer Hall from a hotel room, Green delivered the last lecture of this semester’s course. Since his forced retirement from federal service in March, he has stayed busy crisscrossing the country to speak at conferences, medical centers, and universities. These were engagements he expected to be canceled after his ouster from NHGRI. But he found that he was still in high demand. In fact, everywhere he went, he was being asked to give two talks: one about grand visions for the future of genomics, open to anyone; and the other, just to groups of senior faculty and research administrators, to fill them in on all the changes going on at NIH.

For much of the year, as other institute directors were trapped in administrative leave or embroiled in employment litigation or trying to toe political lines to keep their labs, Green was the only one who’d made a clean break. He’s been using that freedom to pass whatever intel he can to the U.S. research community. “I call it ‘demystifying the demise of NIH,’ because people just don’t understand everything that’s going on and it’s hard to keep up,” Green said. You can take the communicator out of the NIH, but you can’t take the NIH out of the communicator.

At the end of his last lecture at UVA, he encouraged the students to take what they’d learned and apply it to their lives. “You will all be patients, and you’ll also have friends and family members who are patients, and genomics is going to increasingly be a part of medical care that you and your friends and relatives receive,” he said. “As a genomics ambassador, you can help make genomics mainstream in medicine.”

STAT’s coverage of bioethics is supported by a grant from the Greenwall Foundation and the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.

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Megan Molteni

Science Writer

Megan Molteni reports on discoveries from the frontiers of genomic medicine, neuroscience, and reproductive tech. She joined STAT in 2021 after covering health and science at WIRED. You can reach Megan on Signal at mmolteni.13.

Anil Oza

General Assignment Reporter

Anil Oza is a general assignment reporter at STAT focused on the NIH and health equity. You can reach him on Signal at aniloza.16.