It's astonishing to me that the corporate media has not faced up to the reality that the Musk Administration is literally trying to destroy the biomedical and public health research enterprise in the United States. In fact, as far as I can tell the leadership of my own school and university haven't accepted this as a fact. I can understand that it's almost impossible for them to contemplate, but they need to figure it out, and fast.
The question is why they are doing this. The NIH and its research mission are very popular. When Dump tried to cut the NIH budget during his previous presidency, the Republican congress wouldn't go along. Beyond just the general public, universities and the scientists who work at them, and people who specifically want their own children's cancer to be cured and want hope for their parents with Alzheimer's disease, there is a vast capitalist constituency for it. The pharmaceutical and medical device industries depend on the NIH pipeline of basic research to feed their own research and development enterprises, and the new devices and drugs that result are a source of immense profit. The U.S. scientific establishment is the envy of the world, and a source of immense pride for Americans.
If anyone has a better hypothesis about this than mine I'll be happy to hear it. But as far as I can understand this, science is an independent arbiter of truth, president Musk doesn't want that. He wants the truth to be whatever he says it is, and universities are a competing source of epistemological authority. And yes, they're going to do the same thing to what's left of honest, independent journalism. Am I hysterically over-reacting? Nope. This is just the cold truth.
2 comments:
Part of it may be the delay before the effects will be felt. It seems to take a very long time before a medical advance appears as concrete cures. By then someone else will get the blame.
A friend of mine manages a major county budget and has remarked that some members of the council seem to actually believe there is a secret office of waste, fraud, and abuse. The basic idea was invented by Rs a couple generations back, knowing it was false, as an excuse to go after specific programs that interfered with their clients' business. It appears to me that we now have a generation of silicon valley libertardians who, having been raised on that nonsense, actually believe it. They are now uprooting everything they don't understand in hopes of uncovering said hidden office.
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