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Check Out The Family Ties Of House Dem Championing Status Quo At NIH

A Democratic member of Congress has emerged as a vocal defender of the status quo at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is the son of scientists connected to the embattled government agency. ...

But Auchincloss may have a conflict of interest: his parents. Auchincloss’s father, Hugh Auchincloss, was an aide to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci for 16 years. No run-of-the-mill bureaucrat, the senior Auchincloss steered intramural research at NIAID from 2014 to 2015 and stepped in as the acting director of NIAID from 2022 to 2023.

Despite typically operating behind-the-scenes, Auchincloss’s name came under public scrutiny in emails revealed under the Freedom of Information Act by BuzzFeed News in 2021. Officials in Fauci’s inner circle, including the elder Auchincloss, had privately discussed research supported by NIAID with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in February 2020 — months before the research became known to much of the public. ...

Meanwhile, the congressman’s mother, Laurie H. Glimcher, the former president and CEO of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, cowrote five papers with irregularities and errors, including evidence of image manipulation, as reported by The New York Times and attributed to a scientific sleuth who made headlines with his discoveries last year. All of these papers had been supported by NIH funding.

A paper in the prestigious journal Science coauthored by Glimcher was retracted in April 2024, 18 years after publication. The retraction notice acknowledges “discrepancies” in several of the journal’s figures. “The authors are no longer confident that these figures support the conclusions,” it reads.

Glimcher did not respond to a request for comment.

The House Energy And Commerce Committee markup involved its authorization and oversight plan for the 119th Congress. But Auchincloss was among the Democratic members who used the markup to chastise actions by entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that have rankled some in the scientific community. ...

In February 2020, Fauci contacted the elder Auchincloss within hours of discovering the connection between his institute and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“IMPORTANT,” Fauci wrote in the subject line of an email to the elder Auchincloss at 12:29 a.m. on February 1, 2020 — just hours after hearing from a virologist that the genome of the emerging novel coronavirus bore signatures of engineering. The email was released in the tranche obtained by BuzzFeed News.

“Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on,” Fauci said in the email. “You will have tasks today that must be done.” ...

Asked in a congressional transcribed interview about what “tasks” he was expected to do, Hugh Auchincloss said that he could not recall every detail. He said that he was asked to determine whether the research described in the paper had gone through the committee that is supposed to scrutinize the riskiest research, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Committee (P3CO).

It hadn’t. Evidence would later emerge that other officials at NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases had allowed for grantees to determine their own gain-of-function research rules.