Lauer opens up.

In March, Science published a news story by Jeffrey Mervis that chronicled five cases of individuals, mostly Chinese or of Chinese descent, whose research careers were disrupted or ended by personnel actions taken by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). As I wrote in an accompanying editorial, these moves have eroded trust in the NIH and chilled important collaborations with China. The failure of the NIH to adequately explain and document publicly the reasons behind these actions has allowed the scientific community to assume the worst.

Will ARPA-H work?

A new federal agency-approved last month by the United States Congress-is already off to a rocky start. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), proposed by President Biden in 2021, aims to tackle the most intractable biomedical problems by funding innovative, high-risk, high-reward research and swiftly turning discoveries into treatments and cures. But Congress gave the agency a much smaller budget than sought by the administration-$ 1 billion over 3 years, a fraction of the $6.5 billion requested. And as happens whenever there is new money and a new federal agency, a political scrum has erupted over who should control ARPA-H. It is now expected to answer to both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). If it is to deliver on its mission, ARPA-H needs to be an autonomous entity that approaches biomedical research in a way never done before by the federal government. The stakes are high: If ARPA-H fails to produce new clinical advances relatively quickly, it will erode trust in US science. It's time for clear thinking and action about what it will take to make ARPA-H successful.