“President Donald Trump’s push to cut billions of dollars in government contracts is rattling the niche community of scientists who collect, study and share human brains.
Two of the country’s brain banks, which have worked with the government to store and distribute specimens to researchers studying diseases like Parkinson’s and ALS for more than a decade, told POLITICO they had temporarily stopped taking new donations for fear the administration would not renew their contracts. Even though both facilities — home to nearly 8,000 brains between them — eventually received six-month extensions from the National Institutes of Health, the relief came too close to a May 1 deadline.
The director of the University of Maryland Brain and Tissue Bank said it turned away as many as 30 brains from people hoping to do something positive with the remains of a loved one who lived with a neurological disease. The Mount Sinai Brain Bank in New York would have accepted roughly 10 more if it had known its contract was being renewed, according to its program director.
The funding whiplash demonstrates some of the practical consequences of the Trump administration’s rapid-fire approach to cutting federal spending, where even the potential for funding lapses create real setbacks.”