The Impact of Budget Cuts on Medical Research
The National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest source of financing for medical research, has been subjected to huge budget cuts by the Trump administration. Dr. Timothy Johnson, a long-time ABC News Medical Editor and founding editor of the Harvard Medical School’s health letter, shares his thoughts on the matter.
A Career of Medical Journalism
In the course of his long career in medical journalism, Dr. Johnson had the great privilege of getting to know many of the leading medical researchers in the country. They were typically people with great integrity who had devoted themselves to the often frustrating and tedious task of careful research in order to find new healings and prevention for important medical problems. And the end result for many of them was that they could never achieve the discoveries that helped all of us without government support.
The Consequences of Budget Cuts
A new report states that the national health institutes of the Trump government have almost stopped payments for grants of more than 1.8 billion US dollars for almost 700 specific medical research projects. This hunter approach will cause terrible damage to many outstanding research programs and destroy the career of many young doctors who are just starting their research. These are committed people who have had difficult training in many years and may be at the level of some important discoveries.
The Potential for Brain Drain
And it is possible that many of these suddenly defunded researchers will find positions in other inviting countries – a "brain drainage" conversely according to the river of many scientists in this country during and after World War II.
A Call for a Surgical Approach
Why no longer insist on a surgical approach that would find legitimate savings without destroying the research infrastructure that has been serving our country so well for decades? Simply put, we are faced with the choice between intelligent decisions or ruthless destruction that can affect our nation’s health for the coming generations.
The Right Choice
And if one can use a sophisticated medical term, it seems that the right choice is a "breeze". The country is at a crossroads, and the decision made now will have a lasting impact on the future of medical research and the health of the nation.
