A note from TPM Reader MA on biomedical research. I’m sharing it because it’s a good simple explanation not only of the nuts and bolts reality of “your cure isn’t going to be there when you need it” but the massive hit to global competitiveness and economic advantage …
I’m racking my brain trying to figure out why Trump would want to kill funding for curing cancer/Alzheimer’s etc. I guess, as is often the case, with Trump, the simple explanation is the most likely. He sees the university as the enemy and wants to use whatever federal leverage he can to attack them, even if it ends up destroying one of the areas in which the US has a huge comparative advantage. There are significant economic consequences to spiking medical research in the universities: this subsidizes the training of people who will work in the industry, and it drives the types of blue sky research that industry doesn’t want to do, but that it benefits greatly from. It creates a vacuum that other countries will rush to fill. If it persists, the comparative advantage that the US has gained by attracting top global talent will collapse.
