By Science News StaffSeventy-seven U.S. scientists who have won the Nobel Prize today asked Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to “act urgently” to review a controversial NIH decision to terminate a grant that supported research into bat coronaviruses in China.
NIH’s explanation for killing the grant was “preposterous,” the laureates write.On 24 April, NIH informed the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, led by wildlife disease specialist Peter Daszak, that it was ending a grant, first awarded in 2014 and renewed in 2019, because it no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities.