Columbia Professor Who Rallied For Hamas Connected To $100M+ In Grants
A Columbia University professor who participated in pro-Hamas protests has been connected to more than $100 million in grants while she has promoted the idea that brain disease can be catalyzed by racism.
Columbia neuropsychologist Jennifer J. Manly “stood in a human blockade intending to prevent administrators from dismantling the unauthorized encampments last April,” City Journal’s Christopher Rufo and Hannah Grossman note, adding, “According to the National Institutes of Health and other publicly accessible databases, she has been named in connection with over $100 million in grants over the past 20 years.”
Rufo and Grossman point out that in an interview last year, Manly declared that “we shouldn’t blame people for their lifestyle choices in terms of their brain health,” blaming “systems of oppression” and “discriminatory beliefs” to cause an inordinate percentage of dementia among black people. “Any biological differences are driven by … racism,” Manly stated, adding that racism is “the pathway through which race is ‘biologized.’”
“One paper Manly coauthored blamed ‘historical patterns of segregation’ for higher rates of dementia among blacks. Another paper blamed ‘structural sexism’ for declining memory, with the effect found to be stronger among black women,” Rufo and Grossman report.
The National Institutes of Health granted Manly and her colleagues roughly $700,000 to examine how racism and brain disease are connected, prompting a paper titled “The impact of historical lynchings on biological and cognitive health for older adults racialized as Black.”
The paper’s abstract stated, “This study examines the association between state-level exposure to historical lynchings (adverse childhood racism for modern older adults), with C-reactive protein (CRP, a marker of systemic inflammation), and global cognitive performance (modified TICS).”
Another paper, titled “Impact of Structural Socioeconomic Racism and Resilience on Cognitive Change Over Time for Persons Racialized as Black,” stated in its abstract, “These findings reveal the impact of racist U.S. policies enacted in the past that influence cognitive health over time and dementia risk later in life.”
The medical director of Do No Harm, psychiatrist Kurt Miceli, called Manly’s linking lynchings with black dementia rates “political,” not scientific. “He goes on to explain that the marker Manly uses to track her hypothesis of racism-invoked stress—CRP—can rapidly change and is more influenced by health factors such as obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, and high blood pressure,” Rufo and Grossman write, adding, “Manly continues to help lead a multimillion-dollar government project funded by numerous agencies that tracks brain aging. She also currently maintains more than $20 million in active grants to support her research at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute at Columbia.”
