Throughout its history, the United States was a driver of scientific progress less than the beneficiary. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming – Giants who did the modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans. During World War II, the balance was transformed. President Franklin Roosevelt has established the Research and Scientific Development Office and Vanifar Bush, a former dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has taken advantage of his leadership. Within a few years, the agency stimulated the development of an anti -malaria drug, a influenza vaccine, and a widespread penicillin production techniques, with less news, the atomic bomb. Bush has become a champion of the state sponsored by the state, which helps to establish the National Science Corporation and update the National Institutes of Health. He also wrote, “Without scientific progress, no degree of achievement in other directions can ensure our health, prosperity and security as a nation.”
Bush’s vision may be responsible like any century of American scientific domination. Federal government’s research has found a useful expression in many specific technologies in our time: Internet, artificial intelligence, CrisperOzemPic, Marna vaccines that saved an indescribable life during Corona virus disease pandemic. Between 2010 and 2019, more than three hundred and fifty properties were approved in the United States, almost all of them followed their roots to the National Institutes of Health, and the agency has grown to the largest texture in the world for biomedical medical research, with a budget of forty -four billion dollars, and supporting the work of tens of thousands of science. Through some estimates, every dollar invested by the United States generates five dollars of social gains such as economic growth and higher living standards.
Since his return to the White House, Donald Trump has raised the consensus of the long -term parties that the government must fund scientific research and then stay away from the road. His administration stopped communications from health agencies, wiped data from its websites, released hundreds of government scientists, and suggested reducing the budget of the National Science Corporation by two -thirds. It has announced that the National Institutes of Health will no longer honor negotiating rates for “indirect costs” on grants managed – funds that institutions use for things such as laboratory space, search equipment, removal of dangerous waste, and employees to help patients registration in clinical trials. “This is more likely that fewer experimental treatments will reach children,” said Charles Roberts, head of the Cancer Center at St. Jude Hospital for Children’s Research. “More children will die”.
The federal judge temporarily banned this change to indirect costs, but many scientists were competing for a greater problem: the national health institutes have stopped from new grant grants. In the weeks that passed on Trump, it issued about one billion dollars less than it was during the same period last year. In challenging the court’s orders, the administration has largely preserved the freezing of financing, using procedural tactics to impeding the meetings that are discussed by grants or grants, thus stopping research to Alzheimer’s, addiction, heart disease and other cases. (Some scientific review meetings have been allowed to appeal, but standing in high -level gatherings is still completed by financing decisions.)
Disorders are already successive through academic circles. Faculties of medicine stopped employment; Laborators are considering when they will allow employees to leave; Universities reduce the doctorate programs, in some cases canceling offers for admitted students. Meanwhile, biotechnology investors warn against shrinkage in medical innovation. “The development of medicines requires government support for basic science,” said a partner at an investment company last month. “No one can intervene to fill this void.” There is nothing wrong with reform – it is actually the distinctive feature of a healthy system. NIH can restructure its institutes to reduce repeated business, to finance projects with larger transformational capabilities, to demand more transparency in how to calculate administrative expenditures. But what Trump is doing is not the reform, it is sabotage. It cannot come in a worse time.
America has always been a global leader in scientific production, but through various measures, China is now increasing. In recent years, the United States has exceeded the largest producer of the very cited papers and international patent applications. It now gives more doctorate in science and engineering more than the United States, and even before the current funding disturbances, it was expected to match spending and development by the end of the contract. Trump may talk about America first, but his administration’s play book will believe that the United States comes at best, second.
If today we have effective treatments for fatal conditions such as HIV, heart disease and leukemia, this is due to historical investments in foundational research. Without such investments, people will continue to die from these diseases at unreasonable rates. The re -reduction of American science may mean that people will continue to suffer from many diseases that we are not currently presenting: Parkinson, pancreatic cancer, dementia, and others. Economist Alex Tabaruk described patients who die before medical innovation can be developed and approved as buried in an “invisible cemetery”. It is easy to see when the property you eat has a harmful side effect; It is difficult to imagine how no treatment harms people.
Administration’s actions can also mean that people who were getting life rescue treatments will not be able to do so – that they will start filling invisible graves in the future but visual graves today. The administration dismantled the president’s emergency plan AIDS Relief, or PepfarAnd thanks to the provision of about twenty -six million life worldwide. Amid the worst influenza season in the years, the FDA abolished the meeting that experts are discussing the best in the vaccine update to fall. Since the threat of bird flu – the virus tears the farmer and mutates in ways of increasingly threatening human health – the country’s response was not sufficient.
Meanwhile, childhood vaccination rates continue to decline, and measles spread to nine states. Two people-a child in Texas and a man in New Mexico-died the first measles-related death in a decade ago, prompting Robert F. Kennedy, the son, who holds the position of senior health officials in the country and its most important pollen, to the participation of parents in thinking. He also spoke positively about cod liver oil.
“Science, in itself, does not provide any medication,” Vanifar Bush concluded. “It can only be effective in national luxury as a member of a team.” But it seems that our government does not want to play the ball. ♦
