"A key repository for the world's fruit-fly research community became an unexpected casualty of Harvard University's continuing conflict with the administration of US President Donald Trump. In May, the administration froze more than US$2.2 billion in federal funds that were awarded to the university, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant that supported the repository, called FlyBase. Harvard University, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit to end the funding freeze, and the case has been making its way through the courts."
"Its eight staff members were laid off - including database curators Sian Gramates and Victoria Jenkins, both at Harvard - and subawards that funded collaborators at three other universities also disappeared. Gramates has been at FlyBase for more than 20 years, and was looking forward to retiring. Jenkins says she is now seeking opportunities outside science. When they depart, they will take with them decades of institutional knowledge about one of the best-studied model organisms in biology, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster."
More than US$2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard, including the NIH grant supporting FlyBase, were frozen in May. Harvard filed a lawsuit to lift the freeze. FlyBase laid off its eight staff members, including curators Sian Gramates and Victoria Jenkins, and cancelled subawards to collaborators at three other universities. Gramates had worked at FlyBase for more than 20 years and was planning to retire; Jenkins is seeking opportunities outside science. Departures will remove decades of institutional knowledge about Drosophila melanogaster. Similar model organism databases for mice, rats, zebrafish, yeast, frogs, C. elegans and Arabidopsis have long supported large research communities and now face funding losses that threaten curation, staffing, and basic-science progress.
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