Hardly the least of the Congressional assaults was the near loss of the stem cell lines. It was a matter of less than a month by the time this was settled.
A skeleton staff at the US National Institutes of Health has struggled to keep experiments afloat. Bill Branson/NIAMS/NIH
...On 1 October, (click here) after federal budget negotiations reached an impasse and forced the shutdown, the NIH sent 73% of its 18,646 employees home. During the second week of the shutdown, the US Department of Health and Human Services put nearly 1,000 more on unpaid furlough, or enforced leave. As Nature went to press, there were suggestions that the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives could come to a deal with the presidential administration and the Democratic-controlled Senate, which could reopen the government. But during a visit to the NIH on 9 October,Nature found remaining staff members grimly working to keep crucial research efforts afloat. Notably, 1,437 clinical studies are continuing and a few trials have been able to enrol a handful of desperately ill patients. Technicians at animal facilities have stayed on, ensuring that the NIH’s 1.4 million rodents and 3,900 non-human primates receive care. And several hundred employees are allowed to maintain irreplaceable cell lines.
Yet researchers are still finding themselves severely hobbled. One of the worst problems, some say, is the ban on ordering necessary lab materials such as enzymes and chemicals for culturing cells. “We can hold out for maybe a couple weeks with what we have, then we’re in real trouble,” says one lab head from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Like all of the NIH employees who spoke to Nature, he asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to talk to the media. Many experiments are being frozen — in some cases literally — as labs decide which can continue, which must be put on hold and which have to be abandoned. “If this goes on, whole experiments will begin to crumble,” says the NIAID researcher....
