Science is a promise to our children

James Martorano

In my recent column, “What we owe the people cancer has taken,” I was thinking about people I love.

I remembered my father, who died of colon cancer in my arms; my Fordham classmate Patricia; my friend Stew; and my niece Beth, whose diagnosis brought this anguish painfully close again. Behind every debate over research funding stands a family hoping that someone, somewhere, is discovering a way to give them more time together.

Now a major New York Times investigation deepens my concern. Published Oct. 31 under the banner “Science Under Siege,” the article describes damage extending beyond medicine into the laboratories, universities, and scientific careers upon which our future depends. Its warning deserves every American's attention, regardless of party: we are risking an extraordinary inheritance, built through generations of public investment and patient discovery.

According to the Times, officials at the National Institutes of Health delayed or canceled more than 2,000 grants involving biomedical research, including work on cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases. The National Science Foundation withheld more than $1 billion in funding. The Energy Department lost more than 1,000 scientists and technical staff. These figures describe different kinds of disruption; they should not be carelessly combined. Together, however, they reveal a deeply troubling pattern.

Accuracy requires acknowledging another finding: federal research spending remains roughly $200 billion this year, approximately comparable to previous administrations. The danger cannot therefore be explained simply by pointing to a collapsing overall budget. Money can remain on a ledger while scientific capacity deteriorates through delayed grants, lost expertise, political interference, and uncertainty. A laboratory needs dependable support, experienced people and the freedom to follow evidence. An aggregate spending figure cannot guarantee any of those things.

Consider the difference between a budget document and a functioning research team. Years may go into training a scientist, assembling collaborators and establishing an experiment. When funding becomes unpredictable, people must make decisions about their livelihoods. Students reconsider careers. Specialists seek other employment. Restoring an appropriation later cannot automatically reassemble everyone who has scattered. Scientific continuity is an asset, and its destruction carries costs that accounting tables may never adequately capture.

The Times traces this upheaval to federal workforce reductions, pressure on universities to accept ideological demands and efforts by budget director Russell Vought to expand political control over spending. Particularly disturbing is its account of Pentagon laboratories struggling to replace critical personnel partly because of screening for loyalty to presidential goals. National priorities properly influence public investment. But scientific competence must remain indispensable. A researcher’s political agreeableness cannot establish whether an experiment works or a defense technology is reliable.

The administration disputes the accusation that it is weakening science. It says it is modernizing institutions, emphasizing merit and pursuing ambitious national missions. The White House also notes that many departing scientists left voluntarily. Those responses deserve acknowledgment. They do not settle the issue. We must examine whether policies retain expertise, sustain productive work, and encourage talented people to enter research. Calling a departure voluntary does not explain what conditions made leaving preferable to staying.

For families confronting cancer, the stakes are intimate. No one can honestly identify the particular cure that a canceled grant would have produced. Research offers possibilities, never guarantees. Yet that uncertainty strengthens the argument for supporting a broad scientific enterprise. We cannot know beforehand which investigation will open the decisive door. If we demand immediate results from every project, we may eliminate the very work from which tomorrow’s treatments could emerge.

History teaches this patience. In 1976, researchers published a discovery showing that a gene associated with a cancer-causing virus originated in normal cells. The work helped transform understanding of how cancer develops and earned Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Such knowledge emerges through accumulated questions, experiments and corrections. A society that welcomes the eventual medical benefit must also support the years of inquiry that make benefit possible.

The same principle reaches beyond medicine. Government scientists unveiled an early atomic clock in 1949. Today, atomic clocks are essential to GPS, which helps guide everything from family road trips to military operations. The connection illustrates why foundational research matters: an investigation’s eventual usefulness may extend far beyond what the public initially imagines. We impoverish our future when we confuse an unfamiliar question with a useless one.

Meanwhile, the Times reports that foreign applications to doctoral programs at leading American universities fell 21 percent this year. Other countries are seeking to attract researchers who might once have built their careers here. These developments should trouble anyone concerned about American leadership. Our scientific strength has depended on educating talented people and drawing gifted minds from around the world. When that strength weakens, rebuilding it requires more than announcing that America remains exceptional.

There is reason for hope. The investigation describes lawmakers from both parties resisting research cuts and courts restraining parts of the administration’s campaign against universities. That response demonstrates that defending science can transcend political allegiance. We should encourage that cooperation. Republicans, Democrats and independents all have parents who forget familiar names, friends awaiting biopsy results, and children whose futures depend on discoveries not yet made.

My earlier appeal asked readers to support representatives who would safeguard sustained cancer research and hold them to that pledge. I renew that request with greater urgency today. We must judge leadership by what it preserves for people who cannot wait indefinitely: the patient hoping to attend a daughter’s wedding, the grandparent longing to meet a newborn, the child who deserves a lifetime rather than a prognosis.

Let us demand stable research support, transparent funding decisions, rigorous scientific review and protection against political coercion. Let us insist on accountability without treating expertise as an enemy. Public money deserves scrutiny; public science deserves stewardship. Those obligations belong together. Citizens should ask their representatives specific questions: Which research programs are being interrupted? What expertise is being lost? What are you doing to preserve it?

I return, finally, to the bedside. Anyone who has watched someone beloved suffer knows the helplessness of wishing love alone could heal. We hold a hand. We offer reassurance. We hope the physician has another treatment to suggest. Behind that possibility stand researchers whose names we will never know. They need us to defend their work before our own moment of desperation arrives. We owe that defense to those we have lost, to those still fighting, and to the children who will someday ask what we did when their future needed protecting. Let our answer be that we chose knowledge, compassion and the courage to keep searching