#nih grants

Bear with me here:

IF the primary economic problem to address in the US is the trade deficit (as Trump claims, and based on his statements over the past decades, he truly believes), then look at why we have it. We have it because we are wealthy & we buy a lot of things.

So to stop Americans from buying foreign goods, make them unaffordable. He’s even based the tariffs on making our most common purchases our most expensive ones.

But Trump isn’t content to stop there, he’s much more ambitious. So he’s ended price controls on drugs, has fired thousands of people and ended contracts that have put many times more out of work. He won’t establish any certainty in the markets because building new factories here is just a short term fix, and he needs high unemployment to really put his plan into action.

He’s got to make us all poor long-term in order to really help us prosper.

And how did we get so wealthy in the first place? In part because of our federally-funded research sector. So kill that, too.

Maybe even Lesotho can now hire us to manufacture things if we can get our average incomes down under $25/ day.

Rudy W. Giuliani: “Why did the US (NIH) in 2017 give $3.7m to the Wuhan Lab in China? Such grants were prohibited in 2014. Did Pres. Obama grant an exception?”

the US supreme court just allowed the Trump administration to cut diversity related NIH grants and i’m so mad i could cry. this isn’t corporate DEI that you’re afraid could “take well deserving americans’s finance positions” (which is also peak bullshit). this is medical research. this is understanding female reproductive systems and hormones that no one bothered to research for centuries and understanding how the duffy null allele we see in those of african descent affects cancer metastasis and how heart conditions manifest in women and understanding how to treat transgender patients and tracking rates of suicide and depression in queer youth.

do you know what we’ve spent the past couple months doing in my lab? figuring out how to write breast cancer grants without mentioning women. this whole thing feels like a fever dream that we can’t wake up from.

if you think you understand how far back this is going to set us, take that number and multiply it by 30. it’s going to cause a migration of human capital away from the united states, because the people who are NIH funded are 99% of the time the most empathetic and bleeding heart individuals obsessed with that one niche biological phenomenon that could maybe one day allow them to save lives. they work for peanuts and they work longer hours than an investment banker, 7 days a week. they will leave, and trust me there won’t be anyone willing to take their place for decades.

(and if i hear one more person make some kind of economic argument - i’m not only a biologist i also have a degree in economics and none of them know what they’re talking about.)

how could we let this happen? how the hell could we let this happen? i am in anguish over this and i actually cannot fathom a way forward. i can’t imagine the number of projects at my institution alone.

grants will be terminated studying breast cancer, alzheimer’s, HIV prevention, HIV treatments, other neurological disorders- just, what the hell.

Annual Battelle Numbers Shows Growing Startup Community in Illinois

The layoffs seen in the life sciences industry have been slightly offset, by a sharp rise medtech employment in Illinois – meaning job growth in the highly paid biosciences sector has remained generally steady among the nation’s many biotech clusters, according to a Battelle report released at the BIO International Conference.

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