LEBANON — A brief tour and meeting Thursday between U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and officials from Dartmouth Health, Dartmouth Cancer Center and Dartmouth College put into stark relief the many ways in which the Trump Administration is disrupting health care and medical research.

Scientists are being forced to censor themselves when they publish or speak publicly about their work. Cuts to research funding are already taking place, and grants coming up for renewal are in doubt. And less research means fewer clinical trials of new treatments that improve outcomes for cancer patients.

“I am particularly concerned about the cruelty of this administration’s approach where people’s lives are at risk,” Hassan, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said at the start of the roughly half-hour long meeting at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

Hassan was in Lebanon primarily to talk about the administration’s freeze on research funding from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, and walked through Dartmouth Cancer Center and then went upstairs to labs in the Rubin Translational Research building.

Dartmouth Hitchcock’s portfolio of grants from the NIH totals around $18 million, with several million more coming from other federal biomedical research agencies, Steven Bernstein, chief research officer at DHMC, said.

Dartmouth College and its Geisel School of Medicine hold another $97 million, according to Dean Madden, the college’s vice provost for research. All told, research supports around 1,700 jobs between the medical center and the college, Bernstein said.

The Trump Administration froze the NIH grant process on Feb. 22 by blocking the agency from posting new notices on the Federal Register, a requirement before a federal meeting is held. NIH meetings determine which grant applications will receive funding.

Already, Bernstein said, Dartmouth researchers have been told that there are certain grants no longer available to them, including training grants that target “individuals and historically underrepresented communities in science.” Funding for study of health equity, examining access and outcomes for different communities, has been put on hold.

“We have had losses, termination of funding for already funded grants, that affected us for the first time, yesterday,” Bernstein said.

In the 48 hours before Thursday’s meeting, three active and funded grants, including one to study long COVID, overseen by Meagan Stabler, an assistant professor of family and community medicine, were canceled, one of them Thursday morning, Stabler said.

She said she expected another cancellation on Friday and that’s she’s worried about the status of two other grants.

Stabler also leads the Northern New England Co-op Practice and Community Based Research Network, which she called “the nation’s oldest practice-based research network for primary care.”

Its 550 members across Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine include primary care doctors and medical researchers. The four grants cut so far affect providers and patients across that network, she said.

The canceling of grants and the wider freeze on funding puts a generation of researchers at risk, Stabler said. For a budding scientist, it takes a couple of years to develop a grant application that shows enough promise to receive funding.

“These smaller one- to three-year, $40,000-to-$150,000 grants, allow you to build your research portfolio, your publications, preliminary grant findings, in order to go for that next bigger grant, to go from the junior to a more senior researcher,” Stabler said.

Some of the funding is being held up because of how medical researchers consider social factors, such as gender, poverty, race and sexual orientation, what scientists call “social determinants of health,” a term that is now forbidden.

Kay Jankowski, a lead psychologist at DH, was invited to present her research on youth psychiatric disorders and substance use in Washington a couple of weeks ago. She had to submit her presentation slides in advance and when they were returned to her, she was told she could not speak of any differences across groups.

That included not only racial groups or sexual orientation, but also the differences between boys and girls. She considered not attending, but went anyway, after removing data about different groups from her presentation.

“I felt OK, but I just had to aggregate all of the information, and I could not speak about specific groups that are at higher risk,” Jankowski said.

Young researchers are reconsidering whether they want to work in such a censored environment, Madden, the college’s vice provost for research, said. A graduate student who’s looking for jobs at places like Dartmouth Health is turning instead to Europe, he said.

“So we’re talking about a kind of reverse brain drain that happening,” Madden said. Once a generation loses trust that a country won’t impose politics on scientific inquiry, it’s not easy to win it back, he said.

Censorship also is affecting the institution as a whole. Dartmouth Cancer Center just went through the five-year renewal of its status as a cancer center.

It’s one of 57 comprehensive cancer center in the country and the only one outside a major metropolitan area.

“Our renewal is being held up, the notice of award, the delivery of funds, until we remove banned language from our grant,” Steven Leach, the center’s director, told Hassan. “It’s ridiculous. Words like ‘inclusion’ are no longer allowed in scientific communication.”

Overall, hospital officials and researchers said, if the funding freeze continues and other aspects of health research are dismantled, a generation of scientists will be lost, along with the better patient outcomes they could produce.

Linda Vahdat, deputy director of the cancer center, said she was looking recently at a database of patients from the past 25 years, all now dead. If they were patients now, she said, many of them could be cured. The implication is that the research that could cure the next generation of cancer patients is at risk.

Hassan mostly listened, but she also urged those present to talk to their colleagues and the public about what they’re seeing and what effects it’s having.

“When people come together to push back, we have a much better chance of reversing some of these things,” she said.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.