RFK Jr. Begins Remaking NIH

By Dave Levitan | March 20, 2025 | 12:26pm

Photo by Duane Lempke/Wikimedia Commons

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In a first under the new regime, a director of one of the National Institutes of Health’s 27 Institutes and Centers is out. First reported by Stat, Eric Green is gone, having served 16 years as the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. And this does not appear to have been voluntary: in an email sent from acting NIH director Matthew Memoli to all staff and viewed by Splinter, he explained that Green’s latest five-year term ended on March 17, and his appointment was not renewed.

Memoli, who has been at NIH for more than 20 years, seemed to go out of his way to explain the process here. He noted in his email that under the 21st Century Cures Act signed into law in the waning days of the Obama presidency, all NIH directors are appointed for a five-year term; at the end of that term, “the HHS secretary, acting through the NIH Director, may reappoint an NIH Institute Director or appoint another individual. Dr. Green’s tenure ended on March 17, 2025, and his appointment was not renewed.”

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This sure sounds like a “don’t look at me” sort of message. A source at NIH said the non-renewal was very unusual, if not entirely unprecedented. And perhaps of relevance, Green — who has served in multiple leadership roles in his 25 years at NIH, has authored or co-authored almost 400 publications, and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023 — is included at the absolutely loathsome DEIWatchlist site (which we will not link to), for the ostensible crimes of trying to make his Institute and genomic research more inclusive and less racist.

The new HHS secretary, of course, is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who while busy spewing breathtakingly dangerous nonsense about measles, bird flu, and just about anything else he chimes in on, is maybe starting to find time to reshape NIH in his image.

Memoli’s note added that Vence Bonham, Jr., the acting deputy director of NHGRI, “will ensure continuity of operations until a new Director is appointed.” With 27 directors, the five-year trick may repeatedly come in handy, if Kennedy doesn’t want the potential bad PR hits of ousting extremely well qualified people who have held their positions for years or decades. Of course, the reported Reduction in Force plan for NIH may cut that 27 number by almost half, perhaps down to 15 — “the end of NIH as we know it,” per one source, or, if you prefer, “a sign of the functional end of NIH and academic research in the US,” per another. Either way, Green’s ouster may mark the start of the next grim phase at the world’s premier biomedical research enterprise.