One of the country's leading Alzheimer's projects is in jeopardy

SEATTLE — Andrea Gilbert thought she knew what would happen to her brain. The 79-year-old retired attorney, who has Alzheimer’s disease and receives care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, agreed to donate it for research in 2023. She hoped to help scientists unlock the keys to a disease that had left her writing notes to remind herself if she’d already brushed her teeth. The fate of that program is now in limbo because the Trump administration has upended the system that funds biomedical research. “It’s going to go one way or another. I’m not taking it with me,” Gilbert said from a hospital bed as she received an infusion of a drug designed to prevent the disease from worsening. “I hope it gets used well. But, you know, you can’t guarantee anything.” Thousands of grants, including many at public universities and on topics as politically benign as Alzheimer’s, have been caught in what critics say is an unprecedented slowdown of the American research system that is threatening ... Read full article.