In Cape Town, South Africa, one of the world’s foremost H.I.V. researchers has been spending a chunk of each day gently telling longtime workers and young doctoral students that the money is gone and so are their jobs. When the calls are done, she weeps in her empty office.
In the heart of Johannesburg, the lobby of a building that once housed hundreds of scientists is empty of people but choked with discarded office furniture and heaps of files hastily gathered from shuttered research sites.
South Africa has for decades been a medical research powerhouse, yet its stature has been little known to people outside the field. South Africa’s scientists have been responsible for key breakthroughs against major global killers, including heart disease, H.I.V. and respiratory viruses such as Covid-19. They have worked closely with American researchers and have been awarded more research funding from the United States than any other country has received.
But a swift series of executive orders and budget cuts from the Trump administration have, in a matter of months, demolished this research ecosystem.
There are grim ramifications for human health worldwide, and also for pharmaceutical companies, including American giants such as Pfizer, Merck, Abbott and Gilead Sciences, which rely heavily on South Africa’s research complex when they develop and test new drugs, vaccines and treatments.
“South Africa is the beacon,” said Dr. Harold Varmus, a professor of medicine at Cornell University who was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on cancer biology and who was a director of the National Institutes of Health.