I may do a longer, maybe several longer versions of this post. But I think it’s important to state categorically and clearly: DOGE and Donald Trump are trying to shut down advanced medical research, especially cancer research, in the United States. Just that. That seems like a big statement. But it’s accurate. I communicate every day with people at NIH and its various centers. I’m not basing this on their personal responses to a harrowing and disorienting situation, though that is very important in itself. I am reacting to the broader picture built up by the facts emerging from these individual conversations, combined with other reporting and actions throughout the federal government. Reporting is inevitably focused on canceled grants, dismissed researchers, bans on certain forms of communication, on and off-again bans on travel, grant review processes halted.
The NIH and the various other nodes of scientific inquiry in the government are big and much less hierarchically structured than the rest of the government. Reporting has a hard time stepping back and evaluating the systemic picture, goals and inevitable outcomes. If you shut down cell respiration in an organism, the organism will die. And that’s a decent model for what’s happening in these organizations. Only it’s not just cell respiration – it’s every other foundational life process, along with whole digits and limbs simply being removed all at once and carted off for disposal.
My point is simple. We – and I’ve been guilty of this myself – get pulled into each strand of the story: travel, comms, paused grants. What’s important is this bigger picture. It has to be seen as such. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening. You can’t try to stop something unless you understand it. There’s that final point at which the body dies. It becomes a corpse. It can’t be revived.
