Medical Research Is a Life and Death Issue

Arrows have been fired. Arrows continue to be fired. Arrows will continue to be fired for the foreseeable future. Most of them have not reached their targets yet. But they will reach them eventually. Whether in 20 months or 20 years, they will kill.

There will be people dying 15 years from now for want of treatment. Many of them, in another universe, could have survived. We will never know quite what was lost. We will never know which ones could have been saved, or how many; we will only know that an uncertain but likely significant proportion of the victims died because of the actions of RFK Jr (and the Trump administration more generally) in cutting funding for medical research and sabotaging the greatest engine of medical discovery the world has ever known. The costs of aborted progress are invisible.

We know that millions of people around the world, if not billions, owe their livelihoods and sometimes their very existence to the advances in medical science and technology over the previous centuries. We know that new discoveries are being made each year, improving lives for more people. We know that American public research institutions like the National Institutes of Health reliably produce enormous amounts of knowledge, to the betterment of all humanity. All of these facts are easily verified. From these facts, we can quite easily see what will happen when those research institutions are gutted. It means more people will not be saved in time. It means people will die at greater rates than what was going to happen before. Some of those early deaths might end up being from people we know.

I’m setting out these rather obvious facts because it would seem that the present American government has either not considered this, rejects it, or does not care. Robert F Kennedy Jr is a man committed to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and a eugenicist desire to let nature put its scythe to the weak, and the Trump administration is all too happy to enable him. It ultimately does not matter whether or not his actions stem from genuine belief; he is a servant of Pestilence nonetheless. It would be good if he was recognized as such by the opinion-shapers and political leaders of our society. It would be good if the gravity of what is being done was better recognized.

This is more than just an issue of American scientific dominance or the noble pursuit of knowledge; it is a matter of life and death for millions of people around the world, especially those with life-threatening genetic predispositions and disabilities. It is not just a matter of saving lives, although that is reason enough to act; the deaths will fall disproportionately on those who are already disadvantaged in our society. This is a realization that comes more naturally to those with such afflictions (like myself), but it must be understood that medical research is a social justice issue as well.

The previous decades of advances in biotechnology had opened up for so many of us the possibility that we might get to the promised land of long life and liberty in our own lifetimes. It turned the daily toil of life with a chronic disorder into something that we would one day escape from. But the impact was more than just psychological: it was actual. All kinds of diseases, from sickle cell anemia to lung cancer, were being put to rout. A future of dramatically expanded liberty and dignity for the sick could be seen on the horizon. And yet, the Trump administration has abandoned that future. And in abandoning that future, it has abandoned yet more vulnerable people to the cruel hand of fate. This is more than just social Darwinism; it is actual Darwinism. So it has always been for people like us, and so it will be for many more years.

What is to be done in the present (beyond protesting and lobbying for a resumption of medical research funding)? I think the answer comes from a recognition that the life-saving knowledge that research brings is not the property of any one country, especially a country that is willing to throw it away. Rather, it belongs to all mankind. If the United States will not make use of its bounty of scientific talent, then it is the right and the obligation of other nations to poach that talent; the people of the world cannot wait for a change of government when lives are on the line. Scientific brainpower is worth nothing unless it is being used. For that reason, it has been disheartening to see the lack of ambition coming from other wealthy nations when it comes to doing such poaching. If the moral obligation is not felt so strongly by such governments, then let it be said that this is a generational opportunity to build a strong scientific base for decades to come, with all the national glory that brings. Much like Nazism damaged German science forever but produced a flourishing of American science, this is an opportunity for any government with a vision for the future to nourish itself on the rotting carcass of American medical research. Every effort must be taken to entice American scientists, ranging from lavish research funding to automatic permanent residency and easy citizenship. If you’re a policymaker or politician reading this: the costs may be high, but your people will reap the benefits eventually, and so will the people of the world.

What is to be done in the future? We can be guided to the right answer by recognising how critical medical research is, both from the standpoint of saving lives, and also from a social justice perspective. Understanding the life-and-death stakes, we should move decisively to restore and increase research funding when a reasonable government returns to America. We will not be able to save the people who die as a result of the next four years, but if we run fast enough, we will be able to close the research deficit as quickly as possible and as neatly as we can. Moving beyond, we should continue to fund medical and biological research to a far greater extent than before.

If we wish to build a future that truly includes the vulnerable and refuses to leave anyone behind, we need to recognize that lavish medical research funding is as necessary for this purpose as the provision of antibiotics and the affordability of health insurance. For if health is a human right that requires a robust system to be established for that purpose, then medical research must fall under that umbrella. If there is a positive right to life and bodily autonomy, then medical research must fall under that umbrella. The realization of human rights cannot be boiled down to just the organization of society; it requires the marshaling of resources and knowledge to repudiate scarcity and even our natural biological circumstances. Perhaps I will develop something on the latter point at a later date.

Featured image is Linda Vista Community Hospital, by Matthew Dillon