MEDICAL RESEARCH UNDER ATTACK PART 2

IN PART 1, RNA SPECIALIST DR. JEFF COLLER WARNED OF FEDERAL CUTBACKS in medical research in his Guest Essay in The New York Times. Today in Part 2, he cites consequences of following the addled advice of the likes of Trump and RFK Jr. 

Missed Opportunities. Dr. Coller recounts, “Less support for scientists means strange questions no one will get to chase. Exploring those questions is how medicine advances. A handful of soil from Easter Island gave us rapamycin, the drug used to help prevent rejections of transplanted organs. Bacteria defending themselves in a vat of yogurt revealed the system scientists turned into CRISPR gene editing. That tool now corrects the genetic faults behind diseases like sickle cell, and in 2025 a version built for a single baby rewrote the lethal mutation he had been born with.”

“More than a century ago,” Dr. Coller notes, “Louis Pasteur said that chance ‘favors only the prepared mind.’ Public money pays for the trained person, the prepared mind, to be paying attention when a lucky accident happens.”

Trump’s Priorities. “What we spend on such efforts is trivial compared with the rest of the federal budget,” Dr. Coller relates. “A single Tomahawk cruise missile runs about $3.6 million, roughly what it takes to fund one scientist’s multiyear grant. The entire National Science Foundation budget is less than what we spent in the first week of the war with Iran.”

And to what end? As negotiations continue, there are plenty of arguments that we’re ending end up with something considerably less amenable to world peace than Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the plan that Trump so frequently SNEERS AT, caps and all. 

Another Example. Trump recently blew $14.1 million on the National Reflecting Pool, resulting in his trumped-up charge of vandals responsible for its abject renovation failure. By Dr. Coller’s estimate, this amount could have supported multiyear grants for four scientists. (Maybe they should study the algae growth implications of climate change?)

Starving Basic Research. Dr. Coller posits, “The next era of security will be biological as much as military, and every major power knows it. China made biotechnology a national priority 20 years ago. Last year a bipartisan commission created by Congress warned that the United States has only a narrow window to avoid depending on Chinese laboratories for the next generation of medicines. Starving the basic research that feeds our biotechnology, while a rival sprints ahead, is an odd way to defend a country.”

The Covid Experience. Dr. Coller recounts, “I have watched a long-shot question turn into medicine. For years my lab has worked on how the body destroys its own messenger RNA, the molecule that carries our genetic instructions. No one could have justified the research by what it might cure.”

“Then,” notes Dr. Coller, “mRNA became the basis of some Covid vaccines, and that obscure problem turned out to matter, because making the vaccine work means keeping that fragile molecule from being destroyed too fast.” 

“Right now,” Dr. Coller concludes, “in some underfunded lab, a scientist is chasing a question that sounds pointless, and a team somewhere else is a decade into a problem that may take another decade to crack. No one can say if they will succeed. But a century of experience says that funding people to do this work is a good bet. If we stop making that bet, we will pay for it in cures no one will know to miss.”

When will enough of our leadership recognize this?? ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026