Wrecking-ball President, Tongue-tied Senators
And why this matters
I remember the night in 1986 when I met Dr. Stanley Cohen, the research scientist at Vanderbilt Medical Center, and heard him describe his celebrated “basic science” work that had brought him and his colleagues the great honor of the Nobel Prize.
Frankly, his important story of following his investigator’s nose to discover fundamental connections in “human growth factor” - and how it related to breakthroughs in cancer in humans - was hard for me to follow, though he told it with enormous grace and patience.
No wonder. Cohen’s career and my own could not have been more different. I did my work with pencils and notebooks and tape-recorders, while his tools were electron microscopes, biochemistry, and his scientific curiosity. I remember feeling that he must’ve stepped down as many rungs as he could manage on the intellectual ladder to communicate his achievement with our dinner group, while I had stepped as high up it as I could, and still we didn’t come close to meeting on the same rung of that ladder - so much greater was this man’s intellect than mine. But Dr. Cohen told his story patiently to our group, with grace and good cheer. And we were grateful for his effort.
Dr. Cohen’s Nobel had honored his work with other colleagues over many years, discovering an epidermal growth factor that became fundamental to knowledge of how cancer develops, and in turn led to pioneering cancer treatments. (Read more about him here.) That is how ‘basic research’ works.
I’m thinking of Cohen today, having read the news this morning of Vanderbilt’s expected cut of a quarter-billion dollars from its federal funding under the Trump wrecking-ball. (Read more about that here, with grateful acknowledgement to the journalist Nate Rau at Axios Nashville.) This shocking magnitude of a sudden funding reduction is not only a deep loss on many fronts for an important research university but in what that could mean in lost discoveries - and lost lives - that cannot be measured now. So heedless is the new Trump administration of the human impacts from undiscovered science, yet this is part of how the new regime in Washington works its dark vengeance-driven will.
A couple of weeks ago, Keenan Thomas, an enterprising reporter for the Knoxville News Sentinel, also helped to shed some valuable, needed light on the impact of Trump’s freeze on medical research funding through the National Institutes of Health. The journalist disclosed a timely letter from leaders of three of Tennessee’s foremost biomedical research centers, warning of this very kind of institutional impact, and how it threatens so much current Cohen-level research, that ought to continue. Good for them, speaking out as they did.
We Americans desperately need more of this level of institutional courage - and more of that kind of reporting now. We also need more leadership from Tennessee’s congressional delegation, who in their day jobs ought to be working to mitigate such wrong-headed thinking from a rampaging, clueless White House.
To my eye, we are seeing no leadership from Tennessee’s senators Marsha Blackburn and William Hagerty nor from our Republican House members who enjoy sitting on the back bench. They are all too tongue-tied and timid now, including the two of them (Blackburn and Rep. John Rose) who want to be our next Governor. It’s all connected, or ought to be.
Yet they crouch in such fearful dread of Trump, and they keep silent, even as his wrecking-ball swings wildly, causing destruction that comes so disturbingly near to us all.
Keel, you have found or, perhaps, rediscovered your purpose. You are leading in a time of chaos and fear and you are appreciated. From my eye, we could fit other Middle Tennessee journalists with your experience, ability and courage into a restaurant booth. Thank you.
Again, thank you.