Then, early this year, the University of Washington quietly scrubbed its website of any connection to the Sackler family, whose multibillion-dollar company is credited with the advent of OxyContin, the controversial painkiller now under fire for its role in the opioid crisis.

The university decided to end its Sackler postdoctoral program in fall 2017, said UW spokesperson Victor Balta, “following media reports and a lawsuit by the State of Washington connecting the current opioid epidemic to marketing practices of the drug OxyContin by Purdue Pharma.”

The program has not reached its end just yet, however. One final participant was awarded funding in fall 2017 and continues to work toward completion of the postdoc in March 2020.

But the person's work is not being advertised. Where the UW once had a webpage devoted to the Sackler program, there is now only a mostly blank page. It was taken down last January and lives on only in internet archives.

“References to the program on the UW website have been removed, and it will end upon completion of work by the final postdoc to receive the award,” said Balta.

The decision comes as institutions across the world struggle with the ethics of accepting money from the famously philanthropic Sacklers. As thousands of people die from opioid overdoses in the United States, some institutions have faced calls to refuse Sackler donations, which are increasingly painted as blood money. In February, protestors tossed fake prescription slips down the halls of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In early 2018, the editorial board of Harvard’s newspaper, the Crimson, called on the university to consider divesting.

The University of Washington had not faced such visible protest, in part because of the relatively small size of the program, which was overseen by UW professor Stan Froehner.

Since 2010, when the biophysics program began, 21 postdoctoral scholars have been funded through the program, which, according to the now-defunct website, “enables the brightest early career scientists to combine the experimental and computational expertise of multiple laboratories to promote progress in biophysics research.”

In that period, the Sacklers made three gifts totaling about $1.5 million, said Balta. Jon Sackler made one additional gift of $50,000 in 2010 to support UW’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.