The United States, for a large part of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pastor, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming – The giants who wisely have modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans. During the Second World War, balance changed. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Scientific Research and Development Office and hit Vannevar Bush, a former MIT dean, to direct him. In the space of a few years, the agency has stimulated the development of an antimalarial drug, a vaccine against flu, techniques to produce penicillin on a large scale and, less in a healthy way, the atomic bomb. Bush has become a champion of research sponsored by the State, helping to establish the National Science Foundation and to modernize the National Institutes of Health. As he wrote, “without scientific progress, no realization in other directions can ensure our health, our prosperity and our security as a nation.”
Bush’s vision can be as responsible as any other for almost a century of American scientific domination. Research funded by the federal government has found a useful expression in many decisive technologies of our time: Internet, AI, crisprOzempic, and the mRNA vaccines that saved unspeakable lives during the covid pandemic. Between 2010 and 2019, more than three hundred and fifty drugs were approved in the United States, and almost all could trace their roots at the NIH that the agency has become the largest biomedical research fund in the world, with a budget of forty-eight billion dollars, supporting the work of tens of thousands of scientists. According to some estimates, each dollar that the United States invests generates five dollars in social gains such as economic growth and higher living standards.
Donald Trump, since his return to the White House, has upset the long -time bipartite consensus that the government should finance scientific research and then stay away. Its administration has interrupted communications from health agencies, erased data from their websites, dismissed hundreds of government scientists and proposed to reduce the budget of the National Science Foundation by two thirds. He announced that the NIH will no longer honor the negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on the subsidies it administers – in fact the money that institutions use for things such as laboratory space, research equipment, elimination of hazardous waste and staff to help patients register for clinical trials. “This will probably mean that fewer experimental treatments will be able to reach children,” said Charles Roberts, Cancer Center chief of the St. Jude children’s research hospital. “More children will die.”
A federal judge has temporarily blocked this change at indirect costs, but many scientists have been faced with an even more important problem: the NIH has stopped functioning new subsidies. In the weeks that followed that Trump took office, he released about a billion dollars less than in the same period last year. In contempt for judicial orders, the administration has largely maintained a freeze on funding, using procedural tactics to hinder meetings where subsidies are discussed or attributed, thus staboring research on Alzheimer’s disease, dependence, heart disease and other conditions. (Some scientific examination meetings have been authorized to resume, but a moratorium remains on high -level rallies to which funding decisions are finalized.)
Disturbances are already cascaded in the academic world. Medicine schools have interrupted hiring; The laboratories envisage when they will have to let employees go; Universities reduce doctorate. Programs, in some cases, the cancellation of offers to accepted students. Meanwhile, biotechnological investors warn against a contraction in medical innovation. “The development of drugs requires government support for the fundamental sciences,” said an investment business partner last month. “No one else can intervene to fill this void.” There is nothing wrong with reform – it is, in fact, the brand brand of a healthy system. The NIH could support its institutes to minimize duplication work, finance projects with greater transformer potential, to require more transparency in the way institutions calculate their general administrative costs. But what Trump does is not a reform is subversion. And that couldn’t happen at a worst time.
America has long been the world leader in scientific production, but by various measures, China is now ahead. In recent years, he has exceeded the United States as the first producer of highly mentioned articles and requests for international patents. It now attributes more doctoral students in science and genius than the United States and, even before current financing disorders, it was to equal research and development spending by the end of the decade. Trump can first talk about America, but the game book of his administration will ensure that the United States is entering, at best, secondly.
If today we have effective treatments for fatal conditions such as HIV, heart disease and leukemia, it is because of historical investments in basic research. Without such investments, people would still die from these diseases at unacceptable rates. A dismissal of American science could mean that people will continue to suffer from the many diseases for which we currently have little to offer: Parkinson, pancreatic cancer, dementia and others. Economist Alex Tabarrok described patients who die before a medical innovation can be developed and approved as buried in an “invisible cemetery”. It is easy to see when a medication you take has a harmful side effect; It is more difficult to envisage how the lack of treatment harms people harms.
Administration’s actions could also mean that people who received vital treatments will no longer be able – that they will start to populate non -invisible cemeters in the future but cemeteries visible today. The administration has dismantled the president’s emergency plan to AIDS Relief, or pepfarwhich is credited with having saved around twenty-six million lives worldwide. In the middle of the worst flu season for years, the FDA has canceled the meeting to which experts discuss the best way to update the vaccine for the fall. While the threat of the bird flu is rising – the virus is tearing through farms and mutating in a way that is increasingly threatening human health – the country’s response has been terribly inadequate.
Meanwhile, infant vaccination rates continue to drop and a measles epidemic has spread to nine states. Two people died – a child in Texas and a man in the New Mexico – obtaining the first deaths linked to the country’s measles in a decade and inviting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who serves both as a senior health responsible for the country and his first vaccination skeptic, to constantly advise parents to consider their children. He also favorably talked about cod liver oil.
“Science, in itself, does not provide a panacea,” concluded Vannevar Bush. “It can only be effective in national well-being as a member of a team.” But our government does not seem to want to play ball. ♦