A director of contracting at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sought to defy President Donald Trump’s cuts to Harvard University to preserve a grant to facilitate risky viral research, according to a Monday legal filing.
The unnamed official “pleaded” with Pentagon superiors that Harvard’s grant may provide proof of concept for the entire DARPA program – called Assured Microbial Preservation in Harsh or Remote Areas (AMPHORA) – which funds the development of new technology to transport viruses and other pathogens from the wilderness to labs, legal documents show.
Harvard attorneys lean heavily on the anecdote about the disgruntled DARPA official in their motion for summary judgement, first reported by the Boston Globe, as illustrating an extralegal, damaging and “thoughtless” approach by the Trump administration.
The filing does not reflect concerns among some in the scientific community about the practice of transporting viruses from remote places to metropolitan labs: that it has no payoff for the warfighter; that it could generate unforeseen biological threats; and that similar research may have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic.
DARPA did not respond to requests for comment.
Harvard sued the Trump administration on April 21 after refusing to negotiate on a series of suggested reforms on campus. A Harvard task force concluded in an April 2025 report that some instructors had “mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.”
According to DARPA’s July 2023 call for grant proposals, the mission of AMPHORA is to preserve pathogens in the course of detecting emerging threats. Some scientists refer to this discipline as “virus hunting” – the sampling and cataloging viruses in animals across far-flung corners of the globe. Identifying which wild viruses could cause a pandemic sometimes involves amplifying their infectivity and deadliness in the lab.
‘“Samples critical to force health protection can be significantly degraded upon lab receipt,” reads the call for grant proposals. “The AMPHORA program seeks to develop a portable, cold chain free system that can preserve any microbe … increasing the [Pentagon’s] ability to surveil for emerging threats.”
Harvard is the “top performer” on AMPHORA and the termination of its grant “poses grave and immediate harm to national security,” the official told superiors.
Yet some scientists — including National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya — say these projects risk triggering new pandemics. Sometimes labs conduct gain-of-function experiments that enhance a pathogen’s ability to spread and cause disease in humans.
“The way this research program has worked is that we fund people – EcoHealth Alliance once upon a time – to go out into the wild places, partner with foreign countries including China, collect the pathogens in the bat caves or wherever, so that we can catalog all of the viruses and pathogens out there, even if it’s very unlikely many humans would ever come into contact with those things and bring those pathogens into labs, often in city centers,” Bhattacharya said in an interview with the Hoover Institution on May 28.
“The actual conduct of this research is very dangerous. And I think it’s very likely that the COVID pandemic was the result of just this sort of research agenda,” he continued.
Jay Bhattacharya on Gain-of-Function Research
“This is a foolhardy way to pretend to yourself that we’ve protected ourselves against a pandemic when we haven’t … And I think it’s very likely that the COVID pandemic was the result of this kind of research.” pic.twitter.com/ddJSCFHrvq
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) May 30, 2025
In 2023 the U.S. quietly shelved a planned U.S. Agency for International Development virus hunting program called DEEP VZN.
An earlier but similar DAPRA program – the PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program – received a proposal involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018. The Wuhan lab’s American collaborators – EcoHealth Alliance and the University of North Carolina – outlined research plans to construct viruses with some of the unique genomic features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to documents released through a whistleblower and the Freedom of Information Act. Some scientists have described the proposal as akin to a “blueprint” for the COVID-19 virus.
A program officer at DARPA rejected the proposal in part because safety concerns surrounding the gain-of-function research were not addressed, he said in a transcribed interview with congressional investigators.
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