Many of us are alive today thanks to advances in medicine and surgery made possible by basic scientific research carried out at colleges and universities, research funded through competitive grants of federal funds administered through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
I would surely be dead by now were it not for four different immune-, chemo-, and combined immuno-chemotherapies that have held at bay and (several times) beaten back metastatic cancer that is highly likely to cause my death in the next year or two when the efficacy of these treatments runs out. All of the therapy that has kept me alive and functioning reasonably well over the last four years would not exist were it not for basic biological and medical research conducted at universities and financially underpinned by funding through the NIH over many decades.
Stop for a moment and consider how many of your friends, family, and acquaintances remain mobile and active, contributing to their families and to society thanks to surgical replacement of knees, hips, or shoulders, people who only a few decades ago would have withered away in pain and died of cardiovascular disease as they struggled around on crutches or were confined to wheelchairs or their beds. All of these surgical advances have their origins in university research, much of it funded by our tax dollars through NIH.
And effective cancer treatments and joint replacement are only two examples of life-saving and life-improving advances in medical and surgical science conducted at our universities under competitively awarded grants through NIH.
Now, under the flimsy excuse that somehow the money in these grants that funds this research is being wasted and should be cut back, the new administration under Donald Trump and Elon Musk has unilaterally (and illegally) decreed not only an abrupt change in the formula for grant funding, but has frozen the funding for current and ongoing research. For detailed coverage of this issue, I highly recommend Judd Legum’s Popular Information article, “Trump maintains funding freeze at NIH, defying court order [click the underlined title to read]”
For me, this attack on funding for life-saving and life-improving research could not be more of a personal assault, but I titled this post “Cascading Effects” to emphasize that the effects of this assault, if allowed, while have massive consequences to the health and well being of our citizenry and our research standing in the world for decades to come, consequences that rob us of the benefits of research stopped in mid-process, foregone, or blocked.
This is not only deeply personal to me as a cancer patient but it should also be deeply personal to anyone still active today on account of a replaced knee or hip joint, among many other beneficiaries of medical science for whom the benefits are less obvious, including those who did NOT suffer or die from diseases that were routinely fatal or horribly disabling within the memory of many of us (polio is a cardinal example).
Share this widely. Call your congresspeople, especially your Republican congresspeople in protest of this appalling, unconscionable assault on the medical science that has improved all our lives.
Keep to the high ground,,
Jerry