This story would be hard to believe only six months ago. It is now unfortunately the case that, by the slimmest of margins (~ 1.4%), we have in the country's highest office, a person that doesn't read, doesn't listen (unless you are praising him), doesn't care one iota for anyone or anything other than self-gratification, and has publicly said that this was coming (remember his need for revenge on anyone who may have purposely or accidentally impugned him - aside from Dr. Fauci).
If there was ANY hope, it would be with the Democrats and those Republicans and Independents who are afraid, as am I, that this country will be the cause of the collapse of the free world within the next year.
All I can do is join in as a Contrarian, find rallies against these idiots in Washington, and hope that those odd-looking creatures in Congress (must be because they have no spine) will grow a pair each and stand up for what this country paid for in blood, sweat, and tears for over 250 years.
I tried to go through the Project 2025 stuff last year when I first heard sbout it, but I am 86 and have both a short attention span and very low bullshit level.
Right now, I think the scarier issue is not that Project 2025 is real, but that many of the framers and thinkers involved in the development of that plan (including the Orange One) are now in high offices in the government.
Unless we, the "others," get our act together real soon, what we have in this country will get even further flushed away. I live in a "red" state (FL) and unfortunately, we have our own set of buffoons to also deal with at the state level. It is utterly disgusting to see Rubio, DeSantis, and most of the other high-profile politicians in this state genuflect at the mere mention of what's-his-name .... Muskrump, I believe.
Good explanation of the destruction in a way that even the most indifferent voter should understand. The advances made possible by NIH and NSF are almost impossible to overstate; the job losses caused by the swath of destruction will cause immediate pain before the long-term damage of lost research sets in. The silence of Republicans in the face of this is shameful.
I would only quibble with the comparison with FDR, who was merely otherwise occupied and unreceptive to Einstein's message. By contrast, Trump and Musk are actively focused on NIH's on deliberately destroying it. If they recognize "the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings" that is just added incentive to tear it down. On the other hand, at least some of Trump's voters (did they know that was a vote for Musk?) would respond to this message, if it could reach them.
Retired NIH researcher here. I am hearing appalling reports from my former colleagues of the damage being done, the projects that are in danger of being lost. The lab I was associated with is studying genetic diseases that affect children, and we have made good progress to understanding what goes wrong and what efforts may help repair the damage. Much of this work requires production of cell cultures and transgenic mice as model systems to study the diseases. This is NOT the "Transsexual mice" attacked by Trump in his infamous speech last week. There are no "transsexual" mice of any sort, but there are normal mice that can be tested for their responses to large doses of estrogens and androgens. I think it is obvious that such experiments are simply to discover what such treatments do to an organism, not to make "transsexuals" of that organism. This level of ignorance that is now operating ii the Trump/Musk administration and thus in HHS is an abomination to any sane intelligent person in science.
The Republicans in government don’t just have an abominable level of ignorance in science. Their level of ignorance in many fields is extraordinary. Regarding sanity, even the Wall Street Journal recently characterized Trump as “neurotic”.
The University of Alabama UAB is in the top 1% of biomedical research institutions that obtains NIH funding every year. The most recent flagship research done at the UAB campus was actually in collaboration with Vanderbilt University on the transplantation of porcine kidneys into humans with minimal or no rejection. The researchers were able to knock out the genes that are responsible for the most common causes of rejection in renal transplantation. This research has already been applied to real people who have been suffering from kidney failure. A transplant at NYU Langone occurred this December in a 53 year old Alabama woman who has been doing quite well. She is the 2nd patient who has undergone this surgery. The first patient was transplanted at Massachusetts General Hospital another flagship hospital but was unsuccessful due to a secondary cause.
If it wasn’t for all this premier research we have in these elite universities we wouldn’t be able to give the gift of a quality life to our families, friends and loved ones. Having a family member who has gone through an organ transplant and having a career in science and medicine myself no one can imagine how badly this gets under my skin. I am very intolerant to incompetence, ignorance and people who have no empathy towards others. I hope the Trumps, Musks and other psychopaths in the Trusk administration don’t need an organ transplant or a lifesaving treatment that they themselves shuttered.
Actually, as indifferent as these psychopaths are to the tragedies other people face every day, I hope they do someday need an organ transplant or a lifesaving therapy. Maybe then they will finally get the message our scientists, doctors, and ordinary people with horrible health problems have been trying to deliver.
Like millions of other Americans, I am still alive because of the work our scientists do. My doctors had the drugs they needed to get my ovarian cancer into remission. I thank them in my heart every day, but I wish I could do more to help. For right now, I will spend the time their work has given me protesting every place I can and making sure my representatives know what I think.
I’m glad your ovarian cancer is in remission. I’m grateful I got to spend an additional 6 years with my mom after she was diagnosed with a reoccurrence of metastatic breast cancer after having it almost 22 years prior. She took Ibrance and it has a very expensive price tag but it was worth gold to her and all our family.
Thanks so much for writing Michelle. I'm so glad you got those extra six years with your Mom. We should all be grateful to her for raising you, one of the next generation of people in science and medicine who will help generations more. My brother-in-law is a microbiologist at UVA who does cancer research. His whole lab has been thrown into uncertainty. Will they get the next grant to continue their research projects? Can they even finish the projects they are working on? Every day our scientists lose may result in millions of people who die when the work those scientists could be doing would have saved them. Keep on, keeping on. We all need you.
The destruction of the nation’s biomedical research institutions may be an outgrowth of these men’s inferiority complexes. Or, together with their other efforts to undermine the federal government and our national security, and harm the American people, it may be Trump’s gift to his puppetmaster in Moscow. Trump IS the enemy within.
I would like to draw your attention to a possible reason many Republicans are accomplices in the gutting of our nation's health research. The Christian Nationalists who wrote Project 2025 are calling the shots. According to Tom Bartlett in the Atlantic, this is what one man said after his child died of measles, "The death of his daughter... was God’s will. God created measles. God allowed the disease to take his daughter’s life. 'Everybody has to die,' he said."
Its God's will. The media is not covering the background story enough. Every author of a news article should tie their the outrage to Project 2025 before we are all living in the Republic of Gilead.
The losses cannot be calculated. Education, devotion to a line of scientific enquiry, years of project development, teaching and mentoring. What trump & Co. have done is cruel and indefensible. The pay is crap but that is not the motivation. Discovery is. No shame, no excuse, sheer thin skinned envy motivates Musk, Trump and their maggot followers….. I am a parent of two amazing research professionals❤️.
We are losing not only the current research, but the next generation of scientists, too.
These are not the actions of rational adults. They appear to be designed solely to bring an entire nation to heel. Any fool can see they are the opposite of what makes a nation great. How then to explain the behavior of the rest of the GOP as they contort themselves to justify such plainly insane behavior? Something in the water, perhaps.
Trump and his band of sycophants have one goal - make people stupid. Because stupid people will vote for a party that has no decency, empathy or morality. So what if people will die or lose their jobs? They want to look "strong" by "saving money" when all they are doing is destroying American life as we know it.
Musk, Trump, and Kennedy don’t want to support the old or the ailing. Their game turns on several objectives: a) to make voters/supporters as gullible and fearful as possible through poor educational options, QAnon nonsense, and conspiracy theories, b) to initiate the infallible boomer remover (witness the Covid debacle) to grab up SS, Medicare, and Medicaid costs, and c) to not in any way surpass the Stalin/Putin Putin valuation of human worth. I love science and people. I am appalled by this idiocy.
After Einstein's first letter, on August 2, 1939 (which was written by Leo Szilard), Roosevelt did eventually establish the uranium committee on October 19, 1939, which was before Einstein's second letter in 1940. It is true that Alexander Sachs had to push Roosevelt a bit in a meeting on Oct. 11, 1939, but Roosevelt's actions after that were swift and decisive. The Advisory Committee on Uranium met for the first time on Oct. 21, 1939. The Manhattan Project isn't there yet--there are steps between the Advisory Committee on Uranium and the beginning of the Manhatten Project. The uranium committee's first report was issued on November 1, 1939, 12 days after it was founded. It argued for the acquisition of the necessary raw materials and for that acquired what would be the first instance of federal funding (for the raw materials) on the way to the bomb. In early 1940, just months later again, the uranium committee recommended that work proceed on isotope separation and fission chain reactions. Most of the work was done in university laboratories (Chicago, Columbia, Berkeley, for instance) using private funding. By mid- 1940 the National Defense Research Committee took over the uranium committee's charge, but not all of its work. Then in June 1940, the Office of Scientific Research and Development replaced the NDRC. The uranium committee continued to work on basic nuclear processes (separation and fission) and under OSRD became known as section S-1. So by June 1940, 9 months after Einstein's first letter, several possible paths to a bomb were being examined in a complex organization that included federal committees, university labs, and private and federal funding. In July 1941 Britain's MAUD Report was passed on to Vannevar Bush; it gave an estimate of the amount of material needed for the bomb.and made recommendations on separation techniques. By Nov. 6, 1941--a month before Pearl Harbor--Bush is given a better estimate of how much material is needed to make the bomb. The work moves from NDRC to a Top Policy Research group (Bush, Conant, VP, Sec of War, Army Chief of Staff). Bush moves ahead, taking steps to organize engineers and scientists. America is now at war, but the work proceeds. Although the final decision to build the bomb comes in December 1942, there is a tremendous amount of theoretical and experimental work that has been supported by the government since late 1939 that was necessary preparation to building the bomb. Einstein would not have had clearances to know a lot of what was going on, even through his contact with Szilard.
So Einstein's original letter did not fall on deaf ears. Scientists were not a distraction in the White House from Oct. 1939 onward.
Biomedical research is a major component of economic growth, job creation and tax revenue, and was expected to become even more significant in the future until America elected Musk/Trump. It was also expected to generate major improvements to public health in America and around the world. Oh well.
Is it a publicity stunt, revenge on some, a diversion, sign of dementia, insanity, attempt to pump and dump the market, or...? IT DOESN'T MATTER WHY. A corrupt cult master has conned enough voters so that billionaire owned far right media, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and judge buying can elect a spoiled sociopath with the mind of an 8 year old to the presidency. That and these are the problem.
Biomedical research is a major component of economic growth, job creation and tax revenue, and was expected to become even more significant in the future until America elected Musk/Trump. It was also expected to generate major improvements to public health in America and around the world. Oh well.
This story would be hard to believe only six months ago. It is now unfortunately the case that, by the slimmest of margins (~ 1.4%), we have in the country's highest office, a person that doesn't read, doesn't listen (unless you are praising him), doesn't care one iota for anyone or anything other than self-gratification, and has publicly said that this was coming (remember his need for revenge on anyone who may have purposely or accidentally impugned him - aside from Dr. Fauci).
If there was ANY hope, it would be with the Democrats and those Republicans and Independents who are afraid, as am I, that this country will be the cause of the collapse of the free world within the next year.
All I can do is join in as a Contrarian, find rallies against these idiots in Washington, and hope that those odd-looking creatures in Congress (must be because they have no spine) will grow a pair each and stand up for what this country paid for in blood, sweat, and tears for over 250 years.
Ed, the collapse of the free world is the goal. Page 618, Project 2025.
I tried to go through the Project 2025 stuff last year when I first heard sbout it, but I am 86 and have both a short attention span and very low bullshit level.
Right now, I think the scarier issue is not that Project 2025 is real, but that many of the framers and thinkers involved in the development of that plan (including the Orange One) are now in high offices in the government.
Unless we, the "others," get our act together real soon, what we have in this country will get even further flushed away. I live in a "red" state (FL) and unfortunately, we have our own set of buffoons to also deal with at the state level. It is utterly disgusting to see Rubio, DeSantis, and most of the other high-profile politicians in this state genuflect at the mere mention of what's-his-name .... Muskrump, I believe.
Good explanation of the destruction in a way that even the most indifferent voter should understand. The advances made possible by NIH and NSF are almost impossible to overstate; the job losses caused by the swath of destruction will cause immediate pain before the long-term damage of lost research sets in. The silence of Republicans in the face of this is shameful.
I would only quibble with the comparison with FDR, who was merely otherwise occupied and unreceptive to Einstein's message. By contrast, Trump and Musk are actively focused on NIH's on deliberately destroying it. If they recognize "the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings" that is just added incentive to tear it down. On the other hand, at least some of Trump's voters (did they know that was a vote for Musk?) would respond to this message, if it could reach them.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? The message never reaches them…
Retired NIH researcher here. I am hearing appalling reports from my former colleagues of the damage being done, the projects that are in danger of being lost. The lab I was associated with is studying genetic diseases that affect children, and we have made good progress to understanding what goes wrong and what efforts may help repair the damage. Much of this work requires production of cell cultures and transgenic mice as model systems to study the diseases. This is NOT the "Transsexual mice" attacked by Trump in his infamous speech last week. There are no "transsexual" mice of any sort, but there are normal mice that can be tested for their responses to large doses of estrogens and androgens. I think it is obvious that such experiments are simply to discover what such treatments do to an organism, not to make "transsexuals" of that organism. This level of ignorance that is now operating ii the Trump/Musk administration and thus in HHS is an abomination to any sane intelligent person in science.
The Republicans in government don’t just have an abominable level of ignorance in science. Their level of ignorance in many fields is extraordinary. Regarding sanity, even the Wall Street Journal recently characterized Trump as “neurotic”.
And that was a kind evaluation. Check out the Hare list of psychopathy with what is publicly known about Trump.
The University of Alabama UAB is in the top 1% of biomedical research institutions that obtains NIH funding every year. The most recent flagship research done at the UAB campus was actually in collaboration with Vanderbilt University on the transplantation of porcine kidneys into humans with minimal or no rejection. The researchers were able to knock out the genes that are responsible for the most common causes of rejection in renal transplantation. This research has already been applied to real people who have been suffering from kidney failure. A transplant at NYU Langone occurred this December in a 53 year old Alabama woman who has been doing quite well. She is the 2nd patient who has undergone this surgery. The first patient was transplanted at Massachusetts General Hospital another flagship hospital but was unsuccessful due to a secondary cause.
If it wasn’t for all this premier research we have in these elite universities we wouldn’t be able to give the gift of a quality life to our families, friends and loved ones. Having a family member who has gone through an organ transplant and having a career in science and medicine myself no one can imagine how badly this gets under my skin. I am very intolerant to incompetence, ignorance and people who have no empathy towards others. I hope the Trumps, Musks and other psychopaths in the Trusk administration don’t need an organ transplant or a lifesaving treatment that they themselves shuttered.
Actually, as indifferent as these psychopaths are to the tragedies other people face every day, I hope they do someday need an organ transplant or a lifesaving therapy. Maybe then they will finally get the message our scientists, doctors, and ordinary people with horrible health problems have been trying to deliver.
Like millions of other Americans, I am still alive because of the work our scientists do. My doctors had the drugs they needed to get my ovarian cancer into remission. I thank them in my heart every day, but I wish I could do more to help. For right now, I will spend the time their work has given me protesting every place I can and making sure my representatives know what I think.
I’m glad your ovarian cancer is in remission. I’m grateful I got to spend an additional 6 years with my mom after she was diagnosed with a reoccurrence of metastatic breast cancer after having it almost 22 years prior. She took Ibrance and it has a very expensive price tag but it was worth gold to her and all our family.
Thanks so much for writing Michelle. I'm so glad you got those extra six years with your Mom. We should all be grateful to her for raising you, one of the next generation of people in science and medicine who will help generations more. My brother-in-law is a microbiologist at UVA who does cancer research. His whole lab has been thrown into uncertainty. Will they get the next grant to continue their research projects? Can they even finish the projects they are working on? Every day our scientists lose may result in millions of people who die when the work those scientists could be doing would have saved them. Keep on, keeping on. We all need you.
Why would those pigs need a pig transplant?
The destruction of the nation’s biomedical research institutions may be an outgrowth of these men’s inferiority complexes. Or, together with their other efforts to undermine the federal government and our national security, and harm the American people, it may be Trump’s gift to his puppetmaster in Moscow. Trump IS the enemy within.
I would like to draw your attention to a possible reason many Republicans are accomplices in the gutting of our nation's health research. The Christian Nationalists who wrote Project 2025 are calling the shots. According to Tom Bartlett in the Atlantic, this is what one man said after his child died of measles, "The death of his daughter... was God’s will. God created measles. God allowed the disease to take his daughter’s life. 'Everybody has to die,' he said."
Its God's will. The media is not covering the background story enough. Every author of a news article should tie their the outrage to Project 2025 before we are all living in the Republic of Gilead.
Trump is only their useful idiot.
The losses cannot be calculated. Education, devotion to a line of scientific enquiry, years of project development, teaching and mentoring. What trump & Co. have done is cruel and indefensible. The pay is crap but that is not the motivation. Discovery is. No shame, no excuse, sheer thin skinned envy motivates Musk, Trump and their maggot followers….. I am a parent of two amazing research professionals❤️.
We are losing not only the current research, but the next generation of scientists, too.
These are not the actions of rational adults. They appear to be designed solely to bring an entire nation to heel. Any fool can see they are the opposite of what makes a nation great. How then to explain the behavior of the rest of the GOP as they contort themselves to justify such plainly insane behavior? Something in the water, perhaps.
Trump and his band of sycophants have one goal - make people stupid. Because stupid people will vote for a party that has no decency, empathy or morality. So what if people will die or lose their jobs? They want to look "strong" by "saving money" when all they are doing is destroying American life as we know it.
Musk, Trump, and Kennedy don’t want to support the old or the ailing. Their game turns on several objectives: a) to make voters/supporters as gullible and fearful as possible through poor educational options, QAnon nonsense, and conspiracy theories, b) to initiate the infallible boomer remover (witness the Covid debacle) to grab up SS, Medicare, and Medicaid costs, and c) to not in any way surpass the Stalin/Putin Putin valuation of human worth. I love science and people. I am appalled by this idiocy.
After Einstein's first letter, on August 2, 1939 (which was written by Leo Szilard), Roosevelt did eventually establish the uranium committee on October 19, 1939, which was before Einstein's second letter in 1940. It is true that Alexander Sachs had to push Roosevelt a bit in a meeting on Oct. 11, 1939, but Roosevelt's actions after that were swift and decisive. The Advisory Committee on Uranium met for the first time on Oct. 21, 1939. The Manhattan Project isn't there yet--there are steps between the Advisory Committee on Uranium and the beginning of the Manhatten Project. The uranium committee's first report was issued on November 1, 1939, 12 days after it was founded. It argued for the acquisition of the necessary raw materials and for that acquired what would be the first instance of federal funding (for the raw materials) on the way to the bomb. In early 1940, just months later again, the uranium committee recommended that work proceed on isotope separation and fission chain reactions. Most of the work was done in university laboratories (Chicago, Columbia, Berkeley, for instance) using private funding. By mid- 1940 the National Defense Research Committee took over the uranium committee's charge, but not all of its work. Then in June 1940, the Office of Scientific Research and Development replaced the NDRC. The uranium committee continued to work on basic nuclear processes (separation and fission) and under OSRD became known as section S-1. So by June 1940, 9 months after Einstein's first letter, several possible paths to a bomb were being examined in a complex organization that included federal committees, university labs, and private and federal funding. In July 1941 Britain's MAUD Report was passed on to Vannevar Bush; it gave an estimate of the amount of material needed for the bomb.and made recommendations on separation techniques. By Nov. 6, 1941--a month before Pearl Harbor--Bush is given a better estimate of how much material is needed to make the bomb. The work moves from NDRC to a Top Policy Research group (Bush, Conant, VP, Sec of War, Army Chief of Staff). Bush moves ahead, taking steps to organize engineers and scientists. America is now at war, but the work proceeds. Although the final decision to build the bomb comes in December 1942, there is a tremendous amount of theoretical and experimental work that has been supported by the government since late 1939 that was necessary preparation to building the bomb. Einstein would not have had clearances to know a lot of what was going on, even through his contact with Szilard.
So Einstein's original letter did not fall on deaf ears. Scientists were not a distraction in the White House from Oct. 1939 onward.
Amont the sources on the pre-history to the Manhattan Project are: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/
Biomedical research is a major component of economic growth, job creation and tax revenue, and was expected to become even more significant in the future until America elected Musk/Trump. It was also expected to generate major improvements to public health in America and around the world. Oh well.
Is it a publicity stunt, revenge on some, a diversion, sign of dementia, insanity, attempt to pump and dump the market, or...? IT DOESN'T MATTER WHY. A corrupt cult master has conned enough voters so that billionaire owned far right media, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and judge buying can elect a spoiled sociopath with the mind of an 8 year old to the presidency. That and these are the problem.
What do we have without our health, nothing!! This is crucial and we must contact our politicians and tell them to stop this NOW!!
Biomedical research is a major component of economic growth, job creation and tax revenue, and was expected to become even more significant in the future until America elected Musk/Trump. It was also expected to generate major improvements to public health in America and around the world. Oh well.
Killing the goose that lays the golden egg . . .