MEDICAL RESEARCH UNDER ATTACK PART 1

WITH ADDLED GUIDANCE FROM THE LIKES OF RFK JR. AND TRUMP, it’s no surprise that medical research is under attack. How many measles deaths must we experience? What about our military being riddled by the flu?

Dr. Jeff Coller offers a compelling article about this in “The Science That Turned Lizard Venom into GLP-1s Is Under Attack,” The New York Times, June 20, 2026. Dr. Coller directs the RNA Innovation Center at Johns Hopkins University, and he begins by offering an interesting example of medical research.

Here, in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, are tidbits gleaned from Dr. Coller’s Guest Essay, together with my usual Internet sleuthing.  

He describes, “A slow, heavy desert lizard called the Gila monster can go months between meals. In the early 1990s, a physician-scientist named John Eng grew curious about how it keeps its blood sugar steady across those long fasts. Working with modest funds at a Veterans Affairs hospital, he and a colleague studied the lizard’s venom and isolated a molecule that behaved like a human gut hormone, except that it lasted for hours instead of minutes.”

“Years later,” Dr. Coller recounts, “a synthetic version of that molecule became the first of the GLP-1 drugs, the class of drugs the world now knows through Ozempic and Wegovy. They are reshaping how we treat diabetes and obesity and show promise for heart disease and other conditions. They are expected to save tens of thousands of lives a year, if not more. Dr. Eng’s discovery cost almost nothing.”

However…. Dr. Coller observes, “The system that turned that lizard into a medicine is now being dismantled. In 2025, the Trump administration froze or canceled billions of dollars in research grants. Courts have forced the release of much of the frozen money, and Congress rejected proposed cuts to the agencies, but neither controls the checkbook. Over the past year and a half, the agencies have funded fewer grants nearly each month compared with previous years.”

Dr. Coller observes, “The National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, accounts for a fraction of 1 percent of all federal spending. The United States ranks 13th in the amount it spends on academic research as a portion of its overall economy among nations that report spending data to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”

“As Congress takes up next year’s budget,” Dr. Coller relates, “the Trump administration is pushing for even deeper cuts. Last month, the administration proposed a rule that would require federal grants to be approved by political appointees and to ‘demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.’ Under that rule, grant making may slow down even more.”

What?? We know the results of political appointees such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: A lame-brained vaccination reluctance leading to resurgence of maladies once considered all-but-eliminated. Questionable feel-good advice about a nutrition pyramid from a brain-wormed guy who usta snort cocaine off toilet seats.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Dr. Coller identifies inherent dangers of such guidance. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026