“I Am Determined to Carry On This Vital Work”

The federal government has terminated numerous federally funded grants and contracts to Harvard and is scaling back investments in scientific and medical research across the country. In this series, Harvard Medical School scientists discuss how these actions are affecting their research and their labs.

My lab has studied herpes simplex virus for more than four decades. Two-thirds of people under the age of fifty are infected by it. There are two forms: HSV-1 usually causes cold sores on the mouth, and HSV-2 causes lesions on the genitals. The virus infects the body through the skin and then finds its way into sensory neurons and sometimes even the brain, where it can lay dormant for long periods of time.

Some people don’t have any symptoms, but for many people the virus causes painful outbreaks periodically as it emerges from dormancy and flares up. HSV also increases the risk of infection for other diseases, including HIV, so protecting people from HSV would greatly reduce the number of people who get AIDS. We’re also learning more about how having herpes may be related to serious neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.

That’s why it’s so important to understand the basic biology of HSV and all viruses, all microbes, and to study how these things interact with the human body. We’ve made great progress in the time I’ve been working, but there’s still so much left to do. We were getting some important new results, and this is a hard time to curtail this research.

For HSV, there are antiviral drugs that can reduce the risk of a flare-up and treat the symptoms, but there’s no cure. My work has helped find some candidates for vaccines, but so far, we haven’t found anything that has been approved by the FDA. Our first candidate was safe, but it didn’t offer enough protection from infection. We’re working on a second-generation vaccine that looks more promising.

We’ve also used what we have learned from HSV to study a wide range of other dangerous viruses. For example, my lab developed models of HSV that express coronavirus spike proteins, allowing us to study how the immune system responded to SARS-CoV-2.

My lab was finishing up work on multiyear grants on the mechanism of latent infection in HSV and on how the immune system resists HSV. We were set to start another new grant to explore the use of HSV-2 to deliver gene therapy to the central nervous system, including the brain. The virus is so good at getting into the nervous system, it would make a wonderful vehicle to deliver drugs or gene therapy for neurological diseases.

And then, one Thursday evening in May, I received an email, like so many of my Harvard colleagues, informing me that the Trump administration had terminated all of my NIH grants, including a training grant to support PhD students in virology. The termination felt like the death of an elderly relative: I knew it was coming, but it was still a shock.

For forty-five years I’ve received financial support from the government and recognition of the value of this work from my peers, and suddenly the grants are terminated because the NIH says my research “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” How did forty-five years of desired research become undesirable overnight?

We’re losing all the momentum that we gained from the remarkable recent advances in genetics and computational biology.

Since World War II we’ve had an amazingly productive collaboration where the government provides funding, and universities conduct research that’s been decided to be in the best interests of the people of the United States, work that’s been given a seal of approval by scientific experts. These grants weren’t gifts to Harvard, or to the researchers; they’re payment for service to the American people.

I applied to the NIH for grants many times. Some proposals were successful, and some were unsuccessful. The grants that were funded were considered to be the science with the most potential to be useful to the nation.

Since the cancellations, we’ve heard a bit about the importance of academic research in biomedical advances that lead to improved health care and therapeutics. The role of academic labs in the training of future scientists has been discussed less. These labs are like a trade school for some of the most important industries in the nation. All of the scientists in academic labs, biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies, and government labs, all the patent lawyers, all the leaders of the NIH and CDC and other federal agencies that are so important to the scientific and technological enterprise of this country — they all learned how to do science in these academic labs. Our future research capability is endangered by ending training programs.

With the drastic cuts that have been proposed across the board in scientific funding, the changes we are seeing at the NIH and other agencies, we’re losing all the momentum that we gained from the remarkable recent advances in genetics and computational biology. But, like all of my colleagues, students, and trainees, and all of the people that I and others in the virology program have taught over the years, I am determined to carry on this vital work.

My parents grew up in the Great Depression and never forgot the lessons of determination and perseverance that those tough times taught. My father declined to apply for unemployment when he lost his job because he wanted to make his own way.

I did not get to Harvard as a legacy. Having grown up in rural Ohio, I have my own “hillbilly elegy.” I rode the school bus through the strip-mined areas in southeast Ohio and saw the poverty there. In my one interview with an East Coast college, I was told that I would not succeed there because I was from a rural area. I was able to go a private university for college only because of a merit-based scholarship and was accepted to graduate school based on my undergraduate academic record.

When I look at what’s happening, I want to make sure that everyone knows what these cuts will mean: not for me, or for Harvard, or even for the amazing young faculty and students and trainees who are just starting their careers, but for the future of science and for people everywhere, in the United States and around the world.

I was emailing a friend about all this and said that I worry that we’re talking to ourselves, preaching to the choir. And my friend told me that his father, who was a minister, used to say, “You often find that the more you preach, the louder the choir sings.”

So, we'll keep preaching, and we’ll find ways to keep moving science forward.

David Knipe is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the HMS Department of Microbiology.