Harvard To Close New England Primate Research Center

sciencehabit writes "Citing an increasingly bleak outlook for federal research funding, Harvard Medical School is shutting down its major primate center, which has recently experienced the departure of several key scientists and an investigation into its handling of animals. In the announcement, which surprised many primate researchers, the school said it will not seek to renew the New England Primate Research Center's (NEPRC's) 5-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will 'wind down operations' at the center in Southborough, Massachusetts, over the next 2 years. The center, which has a nearly 50-year history, had done groundbreaking work on an AIDS vaccine and developed animal models for diseases such as Parkinson's, among other accomplishments."

Harvard is gone to the dogs.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Its students are cheating. Its professors are either too dumb to use the spreadsheet correctly or so corrupt they cook up data to be shills for austerity mongers. And they cut real research centers to save money. They buy real estate in around Boston from companies going bankrupt and take off the tax rolls of local municipalities (look up the Aresenal area). I think Harvard's mission has become growing the endowments as much as possible while coasting on the goodwill created by earlier decades of solid academic work.