In the latest sign of turmoil at the National Institutes of Health, Lawrence Tabak, longtime NIH principal deputy director, abruptly stepped down yesterday, surprising colleagues and the biomedical research community.
“I write to inform you that I have retired from government service, effective today, 2/11/2025,” wrote Tabak, who held the NIH’s second-highest leadership job, in an email to agency staff sent at 10:09 p.m. He thanked the “amazing people” he has worked with, from his office staff to NIH’s 27 institute directors.
NIH has not issued a public announcement about Tabak’s retirement. But NIH acting Director Matthew Memoli announced the news in a staff memo today, writing that Tabak “has guided NIH through complex issues and will be sorely missed.”
Scientists at NIH and within the biomedical research community expressed dismay at Tabak’s sudden departure, which was not forced, according to a well-placed source at NIH.
A dentist and glycobiologist, Tabak directed NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research for a decade before becoming NIH principal deputy director in 2010. He served as acting NIH director for nearly 2 years after Director Francis Collins stepped down in late 2021 and would have been the obvious pick for that job after NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli resigned in January.
But incoming President Donald Trump instead chose Memoli, an influenza researcher who had relatively little management experience but had drawn media attention for raising questions about who should receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
Over the years, Tabak was called on to lead various NIH policy changes, including an overhaul of peer-review, diversity, and reproducibility initiatives. Other, often sensitive matters he handled included a controversial reorganization and a probe of researchers’ foreign ties.
Tabak “[dealt] with all of the messy or intractable problem[s]” and was “often … the fall guy when things [went] sideways,” commented Jeremy Berg, former director of NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, on Bluesky. “Larry has shoveled so much $hit over the years that he would have been well qualified to work behind the elephants in an old circus.”
Those problems included an NIH grant to a U.S. nonprofit that included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China to study bat coronaviruses. Conservatives, including some Republican lawmakers, accused the lab of creating SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic. Tabak was among NIH officials who vigorously refuted that assertion, arguing that the viruses under study were only distantly related to SARS-CoV-2.
At the same time, Tabak supported stripping NIH grants from the EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that worked with WIV, over violations of NIH guidelines, including the late filing of a grant progress report and other issues—errors that some defenders described as relatively minor.
Although not completely unexpected, Tabak’s sudden announcement shocked many at NIH and beyond. Like some NIH leaders, he also ran a lab, in his case at the dental institute, and his lab members were still meeting regularly with him, according to a source close to the group who asked not to be identified. The source said Tabak had planned to retire in the fall.
Some who interacted with Tabak praised his accomplishments and devotion to NIH. “He tackled so many of the agency’s hardest challenges with extraordinary leadership,” says Carrie Wolinetz of Lewis-Burke Associates, a former NIH chief of staff. Tabak also “cared deeply” for co-workers and “worked around the clock,” she says. “There is probably no single person who is as universally highly respected at NIH as Larry Tabak.”
Tabak helped steer the institute through several presidential administrations, notes Columbia University neuroscientist Joshua Gordon, who stepped down last year as director of the National Institute of Mental Health. He ensured “that each new administration understood the tremendous importance of the research NIH supports, and the excellence of the NIH workforce,” Gordon says.
As Trump puts his stamp on NIH, including a freeze on most travel and communications and possible slashing of its workforce and support for universities, it seems Tabak was not able to make that case this time.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/top-nih-official-suddenly-steps-down
