Imagine

Imagine a world without the internet and cell phones. If a few decades ago a president decided to fire staff and cut funding for research projects, just as this president is doing, that would be the world we would be living in today .

The Department of Defense funded research that led to the development of the internet. Government initiatives funded the development of microchips, essential components of cell phones.

My first experience of death came when I was a young girl in the early 1960’s. My good friend’s 35 year old dad was teasing me one day, and the next day he was dead having suddenly died of a heart attack.

Imagine if heart disease today resulted in the frequent deaths it did when I was growing up. Fortunately due to government support there has been striking reductions in cardiovascular disease and stroke mortality over several decades.

• The American Journal of medicine reports a 39% decrease in deaths from acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) between 1970 and 2010.
• The centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes a 56% decline in age-adjusted death rates for diseases of the heart from 1950 to 1996.
• Sciencedirect.com reports a 70% decrease in the overall, age-standardized premature heart disease mortality rate from 1968 to 2017.

I’m remembering the early 70’s when I worked as a nursing assistant on a cancer floor in a Boston hospital. I saw the majority of those patients die. Imagine if today a diagnosis of cancer was the death sentence it was back then.
In recent times:

• The death rate for breast cancer dropped by 40% from 1989 to 2017.
• The death rate for prostate cancer dropped by 52% from 1993 to 2017.
• The death rate for colorectal cancer dropped by 53% from 1980 to 2017 among males and by 57% from 1969 to 2017 among females.

These outcomes are due to government funded research, which led to clinical advancements in prostate cancer, including early detection and treatment. NIH funded research led to identifying the BRCA gene thereby saving lives for those with a genetic tendency for breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer. Unituxin(daratumumab)an antibody-based immunotherapy, approved by the FDA in 2015, resulted from 30 years of NIH-funded research!

Until this administration came into power, the federal government was the largest source of funding for basic science research and development, the main reason all these these advances were possible.

Additionally, discoveries arising from NIH-funded research provide a foundation for the U.S. biomedical industry, which alone contributes over $69 billion to the U.S. GDP each year and supports over 7 million jobs.

We will never know but we can only imagine a few decades into the future the ground breaking technological and medical advances our institutions could have contributed to making all our lives better, if only the cuts to scientific research weren’t the victims Trump’s and DOGE’s chainsaw