For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their roadmap to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last week, he praised it for addressing a top priority: rebuilding public trust in clinical research. Which made it all the more confusing to the assembled panelists that this meeting would be their last.

The advisory committee, NExTRAC, was established in 2019 to take over the work of a storied panel, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, or RAC. Starting in the mid-70s, as the first genetic engineering technologies were being developed, RAC oversaw the rollout of synthetic insulin and the earliest days of gene therapy’s rocky en

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