Science - USA (2022-01-14)

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SCIENCE science.org 14 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6577 131

O

n 3 January, Isabella Apriyana

grabbed her phone to take a picture of

her lab bench and post it on Twitter.

“A gloomy Monday morning in the be-

ginning of the year,” she tweeted. Apri-

yana, a research assistant who helped

prominent geneticist Herawati Sudoyo map

the genomes of Indigenous groups across In-

donesia, had just lost her job at the Eijkman

Institute for Molecular Biology, along with

112 other people—about 70% of Eijkman’s

staff. The institute itself, a flagship of Indo-

nesian science with roots in the colonial era,

had ceased to exist as an independent lab.

Eijkman, which focuses on genetic disor-

ders, population genetics, and tropical and

emerging diseases, has been absorbed into

Indonesia’s National Research and Innova-

tion Agency (BRIN), established last year

to streamline Indonesian science (Science,

30 April 2021, p. 449). So far, BRIN has swal-

lowed up 33 research agencies in fields as

diverse as archaeology, botany, meteorology,

and astronomy, including the entire Indone-

sian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). Despite pro-

tests at Eijkman and elsewhere, hundreds of

researchers, technicians, and assistants have

lost their jobs because they did not have con-

tracts as civil servants, and BRIN won’t offer

them such contracts now.

“This is an extraordinary setback for In-

donesian science,” says Satryo Brodjonegoro,

head of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences.

He suspects the government is centralizing

the research institutes in part to strengthen

its control over them. Brodjonegoro says

the exodus is disruptive for research and

should have been avoided. Science is team-

work, he says: “We can’t just break up the

research team.”

For Eijkman, the merger is the end of an

era. Founded in 1888 and housed in a hand-

some building in central Jakarta, the insti-

tute was named after its first director, Dutch

pathologist Christiaan Eijkman, who won a

Nobel Prize in 1929 for research that led to

the discovery of vitamin B1. The institute

closed in the 1960s but was resurrected in

1992 by research minister Bacharuddin Jusuf

Habibie, an engineer who later became the

country’s president. Habibie realized “Indo-

nesia needed to have a capacity in basic sci-

ence,” says Sudoyo, one of the first scientists

hired after Eijkman reopened.

Laksana Tri Handoko, head of BRIN, says

integrating Eijkman proved problematic

The Eijkman Institute, founded in 1888, will lose its independence and its building in central Jakarta, Indonesia.

By Dyna Rochmyaningsih

Indonesia’s research reform

triggers layoffs and protests

A new government agency takes control of the country’s

science—including the venerable Eijkman Institute

In people on ARVs for between 4 and SCIENCE POLICY

21 years, HIV proviruses were preferen-

tially integrated in certain ZNF genes.

Why viral DNA persists in those genes is a

mystery that demands further study, some

scientists suggest; it may be an accident, or

the actions of the ZNF proteins may play

a role.

What’s key in the new study, Cohn notes,

is showing that HIV treatment, and not

just the unusual immune abilities of elite

controllers, can drive the virus into those

quiescent regions. “It doesn’t necessarily

need to be that people are somehow elite

and special, but, rather, we might be able

to induce this same phenotype in other

people,” she says.

How to do that remains an open ques-

tion, Cohn notes. Researchers have floated

several ideas for accelerating the block-

and-lock process, including using drugs

that target the proviral genes and gum

up transcription machinery or therapeu-

tic vaccines that speed elimination of the

transcribing proviruses. Others hope that

long-term treatment with standard ARVs

will be enough.

Yu and Lichterfeld say a participant in

one of their studies, a person treated with

ARVs for more than 2 decades who has a

reservoir landscape resembling an elite

controller, has agreed to stop treatment to

test their hypothesis. And last month at a

meeting in Boston on how to control HIV

without ARVs held by amfAR, a foundation

that supports HIV/AIDS research, the two

dozen attendees decided to seek funding

for a new collaboration, headed by Yu. It

hopes to enroll large numbers of people

who have been on ARVs for decades to

examine their HIV integration landscapes

and find more candidates for treatment in-

terruption studies.

Dawn Averitt, who recently joined a pi-

lot study to have her proviruses examined

by Yu and Lichterfeld, says even if the

analysis suggests she is a good candidate

to stop treatment, she’s scared—the drugs

have suppressed her virus for more than

20 years. “It’s nerve wracking,” says Averitt,

who started a nonprofit, the Well Project,

to help women living with the virus and

later founded the Women’s Research Ini-

tiative on HIV/AIDS. “The devil you know

is better than the devil you don’t, right?”

Still, Averitt says if invited, she’d prob-

ably join the study, primarily to help oth-

ers. “I figured out how to do the dance

with these drugs, but I really care what

it means for all of us,” she says. “Imagine

the hope, imagine the possibility, of being

able to say, ‘Worry about keeping it under

control now, don’t worry about what this

means forever.’” j