Josh Marshall published a member newsletter at TPM the other day on the topic of how to save American biomedical research. It’s long but worth a read. Here’s a gift link. I’ll include an excerpt below, but in a nutshell, Marshall says the draconian cuts Republicans are making to biomedical research are happening largely under the radar and that it’s urgent to get the word out now.
Every major disease affecting Americans has what we might call a disease community built up around it. These are a mix of survivors, people suffering from the disease, family members, loved ones and caregivers. To a lesser degree, it involves clinicians and those in the caring fields. Sometimes those communities are strongly tied to the quasi-official fund-raising and public awareness organization to the specific disease. But sometimes they’re not. The key is that these aren’t top-down organizations. They’re genuine mass membership organizations and even movements. Often there are a handful of different organizations. But the point is these communities are out there, regardless of precisely how they’re constituted. They’re made up of people who care deeply about the issue and who can make their voices heard. I first started thinking about this when I was speaking to a former NIH researcher and he mentioned to me how he was about to do a Zoom meeting open to members of a breast cancer–focused organization in a mid-sized to large state. Just in that one state and focused on that one (albeit common) disease, the group had about 80,000 members.
Something clicked in my head. And when I did some more poking around, I learned that what’s happening at NIH and in biomedical research generally was only just beginning to make itself known in these disease communities. Put these two things, these two groups, together — the researchers who know what’s happening and the disease communities who need to know — and it’s like a spark in a room filled with gas fumes.
This is really the entire story. I’ve written in other posts about how we’ve learned over recent months that the modern American university is simply not equipped for this kind of assault. It lacks the tools and experience. I’ve described the challenges the researchers have communicating with the broader public. But these people — the people in the disease communities — are all people who speak human. There are lots and lots of them. They will show up at town halls. In their nature, they transcend ordinary political divisions. This is what has to happen. When the people in the world of biomedical research — let’s cut the technical language: disease cure research — make sustained contact with the people in each of these dozen or so disease communities and help them understand what’s happening, that’s the point when I think everything will change.
But will it happen?
And how soon?
I don’t know if this will happen or the timeline, but from what I hear from my contacts in that community, time is running out. The damage is already considerable, and remember, no one asked for this. So, it’s a vulnerability for Republicans if it can be communicated effectively.
I’m not really a “joiner,” so I don’t participate in any groups that have to do with my particular health issue. But I do still get treatment, and I’m thinking of making some flyers to hang in facility bathroom stalls, etc., urging anyone who sees it to access the facts about the cuts and call their federal representatives to object to it. Other suggestions welcome!
Open thread.
cain
Is it s a vulnerability? Who in the current GOP is interested in research in this field? I feel like the House GOP have completely degraded themselves into only caring about tax cuts as a “this one special trick”.
Research or anything that encourages critical thinking seems to be all being attacked.
trollhattan
All those scientists and techs won’t be sitting around until 2028 to shamble back and resume their old jobs. This is example the Nth of how easy it is to break something that works while making it nearly impossible to rebuild.
Am super concerned about NOAA and the Weather Service, who are more life-and-death critical to US citizens than the military. This will get people killed, land ravaged, resources destroyed.
chemiclord
They may not have asked for this, but 77 million people (many of which who are likely in many of those very boats) requested it and decided it wasn’t a deal breaker.
Suzanne
Funny you mention. I saw some great flyers stuck to a streetlight yesterday, inviting me to join a protest. (I probably will attend, TBD.) Got me thinking about the humble flyer as a communication tool. They kind of fell out of favor for a while, but maybe they’re the right tactic for today. Delightfully analog.
I think a grungy, copy-machine aesthetic might be helpful. Today’s look is too minimal and boring.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: Yes — that’s going to affect us all in one way or another. Hurricane season is less than two weeks away. Let’s see how that goes without NOAA or FEMA.
@Suzanne: Agree about the appeal of the grungy aesthetic. Especially in an AI slop-infused world. A person printed that out and affixed it to a surface.
robtrim
Dems should have been doing this months ago. One of many outrages that a real opposition party should publicize. They should be on the floor of the house and senate every day making waves.
And Medicaid cuts are so outrageous that ramming that fact up the asses of the GOP is a home run.
Lapassionara
@chemiclord: I don’t think eliminating support for biomedical research was on the ballot last fall.
I’m a beneficiary of this type of research, as my treatment for Rheumatoid Arthritis was probably developed as part of this type of research. I know people who had RA in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, when there were no real treatments. They faced constant pain and disfigurement. I do not, thanks to the many treatments now available. Not to mention the many ways the treatments for cancer have improved. The possibilities for the future are wonderful, if the research is continued.
Betty Cracker
I called my shitty Republican House rep today to register objections to the shitty budget bill. Aide sounded a bit harassed, like she’d fielded lots of calls.
Glidwrith
My parents are NOT the pig ignorant yokels and absolutely support my research and other disease-based research, despite being thug supporters. I don’t know if I want to deal with the emotional damage if they choose to disbelieve what shitforbrains is doing to my field.
I have thrown them out of my house once already. Some of that damage was my teenager hiding in the dark in the bathroom crying their eyes out in fear.
squiregeek
Saw a suggestion recently that we quit mentioning biomedical research, as it’s too woke for MAGAs. Instead use “disease cures.” Everybody likes those, except RFK, Jr and pals.
trollhattan
And just how much is this costing me? (Big-ass AF transport, maybe a C-17. “Oh, they were going there already.”)
Marc
Well, the people toll starts at 28, somehow a fully formed tornado hit a city in Kentucky with less than the usual warning time from the NWS. Oh well, what’s a few more deaths in exchange for maximal efficiency.
HopefullyNotcassandra
Yes. Let us publicize this everywhere. Fliers are a great idea. Perhaps writing organizations like the American Heart Association would help too.
Maybe we can get the parents who run our country’s PTA’s to voice outrage to cutting our federal education budget nearly to zero, too.
In my experience, people do not believe the GOP is gutting educational funding, either.
BellyCat
@Glidwrith: This.
My Trump supporting mother ruefully said, “I can’t undo what I and others did with our votes, but maybe things won’t be as bad as people fear. Our country has been through rough patches before and come out just fine.”
Uh huh…
HopefullyNotcassandra
@squiregeek: definitely disease cures
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
Good.
Steve LaBonne
@BellyCat: “I can’t undo burning the house down by playing with matches, but other houses have been rebuilt after fires so maybe it won’t be so bad.”
Baud
@Lapassionara:
If it was part of Project 2025, it was in the ballot. The fact that people didn’t believe us doesn’t change that.
trollhattan
@BellyCat:
Ranks with “Sure, and the climate is always changing.”
Steve LaBonne
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Always be as concrete as possible. Average dumbshits can’t understand abstractions nor follow a chain of inference from “biomedical research” to “disease cures”. Gotta talk baby talk to people with the mentality of babies.
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker: WRT hurricanes, one critical forecasting analysis that has vastly improved over the last 30 years is predictive tracking of the likely landfall path of storms and storm surges. NOAA’s ability to accurately track hurricanes will suffer from these cuts. The only thing “efficient” about the scientific vandalism of the DOGE boys is making budgetary room for huge tax cuts to 1%ers, esp the 0.1%ers.
Chief Oshkosh
@robtrim:
First, maybe they have been, but they’re getting no coverage. There’s plenty that Dems are doing “on the floor of the House and Senate” that never, ever gets covered.
Second, maybe they haven’t been doing this for months. At all. Maybe they never will. The point is, what are WE going to do? Basically Marshall is saying that if you or people in your life are affected by a disease, then you have to be your own advocate for funding research into that disease. You have to be the one to call the electeds. You have to be the one to organize with other affected people. There is no one else.
Unfortunately, I think he’s right.
cain
@trollhattan:
It’s never coming back unless they keep Dems around for awhile. You know how the voters are, they give Dems 2 years to fix it and then vote the other party in.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I wonder how specific diseases “poll test”?
Sure, it’s crass but if the idea is to get thru to the low-info/low-motivation voters everybody likes to denigrate so much, then find the most “front of mind” diseases and push them:
“Did your mother die of breast cancer? We’re gonna fund people so they can find a cure for it.”
“Did your brother die of an overdose? We’re funding studies to help addicts better fight their addiction.”
And so on.
cain
@robtrim:
Maybe they are? I mean, you have to realize that media gatekeepers are not writing anything about it.
When they do talk about Dems, it’s always in some negative fashion about something they aren’t doing or failed to do.
hitchhiker
When mr h broke his neck in 2001, I started on what would be a complicated and endless path toward understanding exactly what the fuck the problem was: Why could scientists not figure out how to help people with spinal cord injuries? Why was there nothing? No hope at all?
Why did a doctor tell me calmly that my 46 yr old husband, the father of my two middle-schoolers, was permanently and catastrophically disabled?
Unlike our dear Betty C, I am kind of a joiner, especially if I get to read and then explain complicated material. I did that (mostly as a volunteer) for more than 20 years in our community, finally stepping aside after I turned 70 and the grandkids arrived.
In spinal cord injury research, studies last for years. Money is unbelievably tight. It’s an “orphan” condition — meaning relatively few people get it. And that means there will never be investors who can expect a big payoff when the day finally arrives that they figure out how to solve even a single aspect of this. Like, say, being able to shit in the usual way.
What they call “translational research” is the holy grail. The translation is from bench to bedside, from lab to clinic, from animal to human. It’s wildly expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to get traction with. One of the recent cuts to scientific research took away about a third of the pitifully tiny pile of money spent annually on spinal cord injury work — just like that. Gone.
We sweated for that money. We followed the scientists whose labs were most likely to get anywhere, and we did everything we could think of to make sure they could keep going. You can imagine how this hits.
Look, mr h is going to live with his disabilities until he dies; we know this and have processed it a long time ago. This isn’t about us. The project is to understand what I think is probably the most complex system that exists — your brain & spinal cord. Getting to Mars is orders of magnitude more simple.
So I don’t know what to say to Betty or anybody who’s trying to sort this out. The stupidity and waste is almost the least of it. They’ve smashed what used to be an orderly (frustrating, slow, but clear!) process by which progress could be made. That’s the message.
We had a way to move forward, but if someone can randomly tear up grants, that’s gone. It’s so radically stupid that you have to breathe into a bag just to keep from breaking things.
cain
@trollhattan:
I love how we’ve created a federal version of the bus’ing of homeless people to a city with a free bus ticket.
cmorenc
@Steve LaBonne: Any counter-programming is going to need to be designed to dispel the general impression among far too much of the electorate that there is an enormous amount of bureaucratic bloat and funding diverted to projects devoted to useless boutique drivel rather than substantive value, with many also believing the only way to get the bloat straightened out is to strip it all down and somehow a better-disciplined scientific do-over will be forthcoming. Despite the utter lack of any objective signs any such scientific renaissance is in the Trump Administration or GOP congressional plans.
Melancholy Jaques
@Chief Oshkosh:
This times a thousand.
Waiting for somebody else to do something is a common affliction amongst our electorate.
Prometheus Shrugged
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for the post. I’m a climate scientist and administrator at an R1 institution that is engaged in not only ocean/climate related research but also in the development of marine natural products (“drugs from the sea”). So the parallels between NOAA and NIH research are actually intersecting in my department! The combined hit from the (illegal) freezing of NIH, NOAA, NASA and NSF funds is not something that any of us could have anticipated and may well be the death knell for our (public) institution, because there just isn’t enough time and economic buffer to survive the enormous shock to our budget.
For example, I can confirm that none of my colleagues who rely completely on NIH funding have received funds for their continuing grants (despite contractual obligations) since January–meaning that they now have no way to pay for staff or student salaries. These are labs where new cancer-fighting drugs and analgesics are routinely discovered and developed. Meanwhile, the loss of NOAA research funds means, among many other things, reduced capacity for life saving forecasts such as hurricane path projection. I listened to a talk last week by Rick Spinrad (former NOAA chief scientist) who made the point that 48 hour hurricane path projections are now more accurate than 12 hour projections were for Katrina, because we now have the instruments and tools to understand where the blobs of warm ocean will be. That critical 1.5-extra-day lead time saves lives, suffering, and money. But the deployment of necessary resources (both human and instrumental) is not being funded.
I agree completely with Josh Marshall that we have the political upper hand in that public polling overwhelming sides with us. But none of us are accustomed to wielding political power on a federal level. I can say that with the other major oceanographic institutions, we’ve discussed a coordinated strike to underscore the urgency and lawlessness of it all. Maybe the old flier approach might do it as well!
But because we can’t afford to keep students or staff for much longer, we can’t rely on the (slow) courts or the (slow) democratic process of voting the morons out. So I appreciate your amplification of the issue.
Ksmiami06
Fund blue state science. Let red states die. Sorry not sorry
Bill Arnold
@Baud:
Took a brief look.
Product 2025 document, page 460:
That’s pretty clear; the agenda was/is to redistribute evaluations of research proposals from actual top-in-field experts to self-proclaimed experts (who, at best, are not top-in-field experts).
There’s also a lot of disparaging talk about NIH/CDC, much of it falsehoods.
TONYG
@Baud: Given the repulsive stupidity of about half the people in the United States, I’m not sure whether anything would have made a difference last year, but I remain furious about the failure of the corporate media to clearly explain the ramifications of Project 2025. They had months to do that, and they absolutely failed. It was probably deliberate failure — they wanted Trump to win.
JML
@robtrim: yes, it’s always the Democrats fault for not fixing the world.
This kind of crap is exhausting.
At the very least, change the framing to be a little less “fuck the democrats” and maybe a little more “I would like to see more of this”
It’s damn hard being the minority party (as democrats in places like Oklahoma or Idaho will tell you), especially when people expect you to generate the results of a majority party regardless.
Marshall makes a good point that there are communities of interest that are large and already organized that need to step forward to counter the stupid insanity of Project 2025 and the fascist wannabe leader who installed it. Most of the “disease/injury curing” communities like this have stayed apolitical, presuming that they could do better if they didn’t get into the political fights. Now they’re finding out that even if you don’t care about politics, politics still cares about you. Will they wring their hands, hope for billionaire saviors, blame the Democrats for “letting” this happen, or will they get in the fight?
a thousand cancer survivors, caregivers, people going through treatment, doctors, nurses, etc showing up at a congressional district office makes an impression. Especially when 2 weeks later it’s two thousand.
bluefoot
@squiregeek: I’m not a fan of “disease cures”, maybe “disease treatments”? And of course besides treatments/cures, science allows for better and earlier diagnosis (advances in technology, new markers – think A1C blood tests, etc), or things like better artificial joints.
It’s going to take a while for the full effects of the cuts to be seen. Scientific research is very much a community endeavor; it’s an entire ecosystem that makes it possible and even more effort for it to run well. Even if funding and staffing went back to what it was in December, it would take months to years to restart some research programs. We already know there are resources and data that are gone forever.
One of the things that freak me out is all the databases that are administered by the government. (PubMed and everything hosted by the National Library of Medicine, various genome databases, all of the FDA website, etc etc) What happens to them?
The cuts to NOAA scare me. Being able to accurately know the weather, see climate trends, predict how bad the fire season might be, etc are so fundamental.
Baud
I’m glad I invested all my retirement money in healing crystals.
frosty
@Betty Cracker: I’ve been running through things to say to Lloyd Smucker who voted no and then voted yes*. I despair of calling but reading your account and that the aide sounded harrassed has put wind in my sails again. I’ll call tomorrow.
*Some legislative One Weird Procedural Trick so that after it’s voted down it can still get out of committee and onto the floor. And here I though Smucker was voting the right way for once. Hah!
frosty
No problem there! T#$%p has plenty of Sharpies!
TONYG
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: The nation’s experience with covid does not inspire confidence in the intelligence of the “average American”. An enormous percentage of the population believed and still believe that covid is a hoax and/or a bioweapon deployed by the dastardly Chinese and/or the result of brown-skinned immigrants, and that Ivermectin should be used while vaccines are avoided. A nation of morons.
dww44
@Marc: I know someone who hails from that area although now resides in a locale 2 states away. She voted for Trump.
TONYG
@Lapassionara: Well, actually, as soon as RFK Junior declared his support for Trump last year, eliminating support for biomedical research was put on the ballot. It was obvious (to me at least) that Trump would reward Junior with a cabinet position, and that Junior would use his position to accelerate his war not only on vaccines but on biomedical research in general. It was all predictable.
Glory b
Full circle moment, Bernie Sanders on a podcast, said the true threat to democracy is the Democratic party
https://bsky.app/profile/eclecticbrotha1.bsky.social/post/3lpkhog2mf22b
Baud
@Glory b:
Do you have a link to a transcript? If I am to villify him, which I have no problem doing when warranted, I want to be precise in my contempt.
bluefoot
@cmorenc:
The thing about research is that we don’t and can’t know a priori what’s going to be “useful.” I mean, mRNA vaccine development was very niche until 2020. It was people who worked with fruit flies and round worms who confirmed which enzymes create beta-amyloid, which leads to Alzheimer’s. Doing fruit fly research sure sounds like “useless boutique drivel” if you aren’t familiar with using model organisms.
I don’t know how to convince people that research funding isn’t given out willy-nilly. It’s a long and arduous process to get to an awarded grant with multiple levels of review. It kind of feels like the equivalent of “young bucks with T-bones and Cadillacs.”
Baud
@Glory b:
Thank you. He started off trying to be reasonable and then gave up when faced with a lie he didn’t want to admit was a lie.
Who are those awful people?
ETA: I’m getting comfortable with that the idea that we’re going to remain in the minority for the rest of my days. The identity of too many people is tied up with hating us.
RaflW
Just going to add my +1 to what Josh and Betty say: This is a vulnerability for Republicans. Maybe some very small fraction of MAGA are so stupid that they think medical research about cancer or other health harms isn’t worth it. But I think the vast majority do. Members of Congress, not just in swing seats, have to feel heat about this.
I think Republicans are nuts for planing the cuts to Medicaid that they’re ramming thru this week. It will displace a ton of people from nursing homes, likely bankrupt and close both nursing homes and a number of rural hospitals, and a significant number of prime voting block people will suddenly become sandwich generation people at a time they never expected it.
Message the GOP “Make America Carcinogenic Again” together with “Gramma is movin’ back in” and whoooo, boy 2026 and 2028 are gonna be LIT.
bluefoot
Now that I’ve vented, I am trying to think about what to do besides calling my members of Congress. I know patient advocacy groups can have a far reach and can be well connected into the government scientific infrastructure to make patients’ voices heard. Do research universities have any sort of advocacy/government policy footprint when it comes to scientific research? Back when i was in academia, there was very little so as to avoid potential conflict of interest. And any potential conflicts of interest are required to be declared.
There are also disease awareness days/months. Maybe there are ways to leverage those more/better to get patients and allies noticed by those in power.
Gin & Tonic
@Suzanne: Mimeograph for the win!
zhena gogolia
@cmorenc: Blame Proxmire.
trollhattan
@hitchhiker:
Can’t begin to imagine the utter frustration for you and the mister. What a life’s pivot.
My kid did lab work over the last year in regenerative medicine research, growing human cells derived from stem cells. (Shhh, don’t tell The Wrong People. Remember Bush Jr. banning human cloning, out of the blue?)
So very promising. The project lead evidently restored his ability to walk using stems from the lab, but I don’t know the nature of his affliction and when the kid starts describing the tech my brain turns to old person’s oatmeal.
I do wonder what happens to the program now, nor know how the university is funding it.
trollhattan
@Baud:
Double your money selling them to Wrong Naomi.
Ohio Mom
@Lapassionara: When I went to my very first rheumatology appointment, one of the forms I had to complete while biding my time in the waiting room instructed me to circle all the meds I had ever taken for RA, followed by an extremely long list.
I just looked at all those weird names and thought, “I’m in luck, this is a condition with a lot of treatments.”
trollhattan
@Ohio Mom:
Watching streaming-only teevee shows I get quite the education on prescription drugs, the large part for ailments I either never heard of or can’t translate their acronyms.
So very many.
“Plexahexacanardis is for moderate to severe PDQ. Many patients report their symptoms ease within six to eleventy months. Do not take Plexahexacanardis if allergic to Plexahexacanardis. Side effects include uncontrolled gambling and death.”
Lily
Most talk in the media about Medicaid cuts and threats to Soc Security that I see never mentions the obvious.
To say that Medicaid “goes to” recipients ignores that it’s actually a force multiplier. It “goes to” health techs and aides, lab workers, drug counselors, food and pharmacy item suppliers and truckers (not to mention facilities and doctors/nurses), and to planned parenthood and other clinics and community treatment offerings on and on.
What’s the effect on employment numbers and the economy of the big immediate cuts they want to pass?
Social security “recipients” … more clear than that phrase or to say they “pay into” the system, is to say that it’s $ that was taken out of their paychecks every month. $ they already earned. No opting in or out as long as the worker is in the US.
And the biggest unsaid thing is, the social security checks of lower/middle class earners go directly into the economy to landlords, grocers, oil and gas and electric companies and their employees, banks and credit card companies, etc. Stop social security checks and the economy begins to crash right away. Put out the numbers.
Cut Medicaid and unemployment goes bananas, much of it lower wage jobs.
I’d like the media and the Dems to make a big deal about this.
Glory b
@Baud: https://www.aol.com/why-m-proudly-independent-bernie-150418748.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKKDImwawsr_N63lJm6hOZthDP9_8hfn_eVqz360QUl3FoxQoicqoDMFifZ4ir8B5LJYR_-SedajEump4JdlYhqSMQER70LcuI6WELm51N1v-BNG5gVaxFrEC7fnI79HkJqwEPQDzs_tJydWy_HI3JsU7TtaJoGOI-hNpZRd0bDr
Baud
@Glory b:
Thanks. I watched the video on the Blue sky link you posted.
ETA: oh wow. That has more info than was in the video.
He needs to resign as the Senate outreach guy.
JCJ
While “disease cures” doesn’t sound bad, it might often overstate the benefits. One of the most amazing things to me is the change in outcomes that can be seen with pembroluzimab (Keytruda) and other targeted therapies. They are going to cure every malady, but they can have a significant benefit for the patients in whom they can be effective. When you are inundated with pharmaceutical ads you can hear the specific “targets” listed (PDL-1 expression, EGFR mutated, HER-2 positive or low), etc). Why are these ads on TV? Beats me. I imagine every medical oncologist wants to use these medications when appropriate. It is sad to see a patient who does not have a “target able mutation” lament this fact since these medications are not effective in their cases. A few years ago I would see reports listing all of the mutations found, but often there were no therapies available. Those results would sometimes have possibilities listed but with no treatment approved. Biomedical research will help lead to realization of those possibilities. How does one communicate that to a Trumpist? No idea.
Glory b
And The Hill twists the knife right after Biden’s diagnosis.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5304915-democrats-demand-biden-admit-defeat/
David_C
Thank you Betty! And others who are in the trenches as scientists or patients/spouses or very knowledgable about hospice scientific research operates.
Josh had a follow-up post, noting that this needs to be grass roots. The major organizations have to tread lightly, but any kind of advocacy, individual or collective, matters. I was in the first Stand Up for Science rally, and there were several elected officials, despite the fact that they have been responding to so many assaults.
And science in red states matters. Scientists in Texas, Florida, and the home of my alma mater, Kentucky, are top-notch and need support, and their universities benefit from funding.
Steve LaBonne
@zhena gogolia: I’m definitely old enough to remember that mofo. The traitors on “our” side make me furious.
David_C
To add: Jay B hosted a town hall at NIH. I have to run, but it was awful – not a lot of hope for the extramural research community. Reddit has some insider observations.
Gretchen
@bluefoot: we can’t convince them because they don’t want to be convinced. These same people simultaneously believe that covid is no worse than a cold and evil scientists are trying to control them by forcing them to wear useless masks, and at the same time covid is a horrendously dangerous bio weapon developed by the Chinese to kill us all! Um, both can’t be true?
These are the people in the « masks and vaccines don’t work » camp. Sure, they don’t work 100% of the time – they decrease your chances of getting sick by 90%, but you can still get sick. « See? I still got sick! They don’t work and science lied! »
Gretchen
@zhena gogolia: Is Proxmire the Golden Fleece guy who’d cherry-pick funny-sounding research projects to claim waste in research funding? Didn’t the new weight-loss drugs come from a hormone in lizard-spit? That would have sounded absurd read out in Congress.
Glory b
@Gretchen: He is.
Many expenditures that were actually good were made to sound ridiculous and wateful.
Even then, the media guffawed at him but never followed up to see if any were worthwhile.
Albatrossity
Once Lysenko convinced Stalin that genuine scientific research was not what they wanted to do, it took 30 years (and a few famines) for the USSR to figure out that maybe that had been a mistake. The problem with killing research is that you are killing the future, and voters/media/business/politicians don’t ever really care about the future…
BellyCat
@Steve LaBonne:
@trollhattan:
Dad to kid with “No Ragrets” tattoo across entire neck: “Not even a single letter?”
(Evergreen scene from “Meet the Millers”)
HopefullyNotcassandra
@JCJ: if we continue with this research, one day your Beloved might get a miracle from a doctor with twinkling eyes
The eyes twinkle because that physician can actually heal.
Who prefers the other day? Sadists
i do think that is about it
Another Scott
@Baud: The thing to remember about St. Bernard is that he’s not a Democrat.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
stinger
@Baud: Is it possible to prevent him from running as a Democrat in the future? Using our infrastructure, our money, our name, to run for president — twice — and then say crap like this about the Democratic Party.
Presumably he’s old enough that it won’t come up again, but it might, and I want him to be publicly told NOW not ever to try it again. Our big tent isn’t quite that big.
Manyakitty
@Prometheus Shrugged: thanks for the informative comment. You might consider sending it out as a letter to the editor or the publications looking for perspectives like yours.
Soprano2
At my last dementia support group meeting there was worried talk about the Medicaid cuts. Believe me, these people already know the consequences of cutting Medicaid. Their anger can be harnessed for good things.
caphilldcne
For anyone inclined to write their member of Congress and tell them to vote against the FY26 budget, here’s a good fact sheet on research issues you can share: https://www.aamc.org/media/83356/download