Cutting NIH funding puts my life on the line — and maybe yours, as well

“This is what the people voted for” — or so we hear from the White House with each slashed program. But is it? Did people really vote to tear apart the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and lay waste to the nation’s scientific infrastructure?

Perhaps you did, wondering what we get for our $48 billion every year.

I know what I have gotten: my life back.

The pioneering work that led to the drug I take for a neurodegenerative disease was done at the NIH, by a foreign scientist here on a visa. Without that drug, I struggle to write on the blackboard, walk down the hallway, or even brush my teeth. It’s not a cure, but with it, I can work full time — and pay the taxes that help support the NIH.

I also know what others have gotten. A teenage friend died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in the 1970s, when survival rates were about 25%. Now 90% of children with ALL survive thanks, in part, to research supported by the NIH.

A study by Ekaterina Cleary, Matthew Jackson, and Edward Zhou published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2023 showed that nearly every drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 2010 and 2019 was touched by NIH funding. Shingrix to prevent the misery of shingles. Dulaglutide to control blood sugar in Type 2 diabetics. Stelara for Crohn’s disease. Lifesaving drugs for cancer, including Keytruda and aflibercept. My own research into the mechanism by which the anti-cancer drug Taxol works was funded, in part, by the NIH.

Private investment in pharmaceutical research cannot replace the NIH. The work done by academic scientists is not proprietary and can be shared widely, amplifying the effect of our government investment. Commercial companies have a responsibility to shareholders, they cannot take as much risk as NIH-funded projects can.

Not every research project on lizard saliva will lead to a blockbuster drug (as it did for Ozempic), but some will. We need both public investment and the private sector to continue to be world leaders in health care.

But you voted to get rid of “wokeness,” not real science, you say? The U.S. has a high maternal and infant mortality rate, appallingly so for Black women. Canceling the research related to race keeps us from understanding why these disparities exist and what to do about them. Women and babies will continue to die.

If ending public investment in biomedical research in the U.S. is what you hoped for when you voted in the 2024 presidential election, then I expect you to look me in the eye and tell me you voted for me to be disabled and unemployed.

I hope you can explain to your neighbor why her grandchild was stillborn and her daughter dead. Or tell your father that no cure for your mother’s Alzheimer’s disease is coming anytime soon. Because that’s what you voted for.

If this isn’t what you voted for, then I urge you to call your representative and your senator and tell them so. Before it’s your life on the line.

Michelle Francl-Donnay is a professor of chemistry at Bryn Mawr College and an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory. Her two most recent books are “Prayer: Biblical Wisdom for Seeking God” and “Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea,” which led to a small kerfuffle with Britain over the best way to make tea.