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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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