Ex-NIH leader repeats denial that ‘transgender mice’ experiments ever happened

President Joe Biden’s former director of the National Institutes of Health said that the institutes never funded “transgender” mice experiments despite a litany of NIH projects detailing just such experiments.

Ex-NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli made the claim at a March 28 Senate roundtable.

“I can assure you that NIH has never funded transgender mice,” Bertagnolli said.

White Coat Waste Project, a bipartisan government watchdog that seeks to end tax funding for laboratory testing on animals, has identified millions in federal spending across three dozen grants that have been used to fund sex changes and sterilization in mice and rats.

The Trump administration rescinded 10 of these grants in March. Six of the grants were approved during the same time period that Bertagnolli led the institutes, from November 2023 to January 2025. These grants included a $377,894 project on the “microbiome-mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice,” and a $1.1 million project to castrate male rats and inject them with estrogen, remove female rats’ ovaries and inject them with testosterone, and expose the mice to the party drug GHB.

Bertagnolli did not respond to a request for comment.

Bertagnolli’s comments denying rather than defending the experiments demonstrate that they are a lightning rod for an agency already facing declines in public trust, said Justin Goodman, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste.

“These experiments are a major liability for this embattled agency already under the microscope for gross mismanagement,” said Goodman.

Both Bertagnolli and the Democratic senators hosting the roundtable deflected on the experiments — and their broader implications about the incentives rewarded at the NIH — by arguing that Trump had mistakenly identified experiments involving transgenic mice. Transgenic mice are engineered with foreign DNA, usually to express human cells, and are used widely in biomedical research.

“I sat there at the State of the Union and listened to the president talk about the millions of dollars spent on transgender mice,” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to chuckles in the room. “Do you know what he was probably talking about, the millions of dollars? Transgenic mice?”

“Correct,” Bertagnolli replied.

White Coat Waste is clear on the difference between transgender mice and transgenic mice, Goodman said. White Coat Waste has exposed connections between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab at the COVID-19 pandemic’s epicenter. Transgenic mice engineered by an NIH-supported lab to express human lung cells shipped to the Wuhan lab are among the connections that have generated concerns.

“Despite being 100% real, transgender animal experiments seem so outrageous that it’s easy to trick people into thinking it’s fake news,” said Goodman.

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