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SCIENCE, NOT STONE AGE
Mary G. Barry, MD
Louisville Medicine Editor editor @ glms. org
SCIENCE IS BIGLY.
It supplies your pleasures( the internet, the glories of Disney, the greater glories of Apple, and all manner of computer generated explosions in the games and movies you love). You just try using Twitter without scientists. You want servers? Networks? Cell towers? Satellites? WiFi? Cable news?
It guards your health. Want to do without your Prilosec? Your Viagra? Your chemo? Your EMS? How about the life of your preemie in the NICU? Without science, doctors are useless.
Science marches on, they tell us( it certainly did, all over this country, on Earth Day, April 22). Scientists, including our own Dr. Ben Jenson and Shin-Je Ghim, Ph. D., figured out the HPV vaccine, which prevents many cancers. Scientists rose to the occasion and were doing trials of Ebola vaccine within a year. Scientific doctors and researchers together have invented every vaccine and every medicine we use. You didn’ t die of strep throat? Thank a scientist.
Science guards our troops. Who invented Kevlar? A Pennyslvania-born woman did that; a chemist at DuPont, Stephanie Kwolek, who lived to be 90. Besides the countless soldiers, there’ s a Survivors’ Club of police officers who are alive because of her vest. At the time of her death in 2014, there were more than 3,100 police officers in the club.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health work night and day, in every branch of medicine. Scientists at Bethesda have studied Traumatic Brain Injury more than any other group. The NIH is the largest biomedical research facility in the world. It is home to the National Cancer Institute and multiple other flagship agencies of the US research effort. It provides funding through intramural grants to 1,700 or so of its own principal investigators, but sends 80 percent of its funding to researchers from other institutions. It is the home of rare diseases of every stripe. Its genetic databanks store astronomical amounts of gene variants from inborn and acquired diseases, in hopes of unlocking one day a better treatment, or even a cure.( For instance, two of my first cousins died of ALS, and their samples live there, waiting for someone to have the tools and the imagination to discover a different way to help the next person.) Over 300,000 doctors and experts in every field of medicine collaborate across the country and through their various interests, around the world.
The NIH is the home of firsts. In the 1870s, Congress used its network of Marine Hospitals and physicians for our first nationally funded, federally initiated research projects, to combat cholera and yellow fever. It was the first institution to require stringent, detailed informed consent for human subjects of research studies, as a condition of receiving grant money( but only since the 1960s, when a researcher was discovered injecting cancer cells into patients without their knowledge). Because of the NIH mandate, we have Pub- MedCentral in the National Library of Medicine, the first completely open access program for every manuscript funded by the NIH since 2008.
As of March, as part of his plan for change in the federal government, President Trump proposed to cut spending for biomedical research by 20 percent, while increasing the military budget by $ 54 billion dollars. The budget proposal also contains an early blueprint for“ reorganizing” the various Institutes“ for efficiency.”
This goes against the grain of all previous bipartisan agreements to maintain and often to increase such funding. Just this fall, Congress approved the last increase of about $ 2 billion and in recent committee meetings, had discussed another $ 2 billion to be added. The last time that politicians seriously interfered with the NIH mission,
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