ACLU of Northern California (Sep 16)
"Today, researchers filed a class action lawsuit challenging the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) policy of blocking grants in order to censor views it disagrees with, on everything from DEI to gender identity to climate change. The lawsuit alleges that NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, is unconstitutionally censoring research and allowing political ideology to override scientific expertise in determining which projects receive federal funding, contrary to congressional mandates. ...
"NIH is using a troubling list of 235 keywords as proxies to identify grants or researchers likely to express or support perspectives this administration does not like. The forbidden terms include “equity,” “advancing diversity,” “racist,” “gender,” “Latinx,” “climate change,” and “pregnant individual,” among others. This list is being used to review grant applications as well. Some grants and applications are summarily terminated or denied, while NIH has sought to renegotiate others, requiring researchers to scrub their grant materials of flagged words. If the researcher refuses, NIH terminates the grant or stops the application from advancing."
See also a previous DCSS news item, "Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH" (Sep 11)
