Shiny Chandravel, Contributing Writer
I wonder how quickly the Sumerians would have invented the wheel had the fire keeping them warm died out.
How would the polio vaccine have been synthesized if the lights above Dr. Jonas Salk flickered and died?
Imagine if Einstein had been denied the chalk that would one day illustrate the theory of relativity — changing our understanding of the universe forever.
These moments of human discovery stand as reminders to be grateful that our scientists and innovators had heat to warm them, lights to shine on them and resources to make their work possible. Their genius, while strong enough to support the gears that run civilizations today, was once vulnerable and fragile too.
I have worked in a microbiology lab at VCU for a year and a half now, studying a vaginal bacterium that may be linked to pre-term birth in pregnant women.
I vividly remember the week the Trump Administration warned universities not to fund research including the word “women.”
That day, my peers and I did not face our microscopes, pipetting away. We faced each other. Uncertainty suffocated the room as we discussed the fates of potential Ph.D. positions, student-researcher programs and ultimately where our years of research might end up if we could not find the funding to support it.
Would our agar plates of growing bacteria colonies be tossed in the trash, indistinguishable from soda bottles and chewed-up gum? Do we just freeze what we can until a new generation of scientists dust off our unfinished work, because by then, learning about women’s bodies will be acceptable? These fears did not just remain within our four walls. Labs across our country were in the same position as us, having committed the crime of researching the prohibited — our country’s women.
The science purge did not start there. Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stripped their websites of vital information related to HIV, sexual health and maternal health.
Science is not a political entity. It is as eternal as the water we drink and the air we breathe. But the encroachment of our government — censoring our papers and controlling the flow of funds — threatens not only our resources and scientific freedom, but something already all too vulnerable: our credibility.
Intellectuals are accused of twisting their “scientific findings” to push personal agendas. Vaccine standards, once hailed as medical miracles, are now considered political ploys, thanks to HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s intrusion in public health. Masks were once known to protect against infectious diseases. Now they are symbols of an “ideology.”
Our government, now more than ever before, toys with the public’s skepticism of science as if it were child’s play — removing highly educated experts and replacing them with politically compliant figures before our very eyes.
Instead of rebuilding trust in education and research, politicians are sowing resentment and mistrust towards the very institutions meant to guide discovery. Yet, while the delicacy of public health and clinical research is manipulated in partisan games, the price will ultimately be ours to bear.
It is our decades of research we are losing.
It is our country’s brightest minds that are fleeing as intellectual refugees to China and other nations.
It is our schools that are losing programs and resources.
It is our Earth that will be irreparably hurt.
It is our hospitals, especially those in the lowest income and most rural areas, that are being closed.
It is our lives that will be lost.
The fragility of our labs and schools today is not normal. It has been manufactured by leaders trading our future for their twisted vision of America, who weaken the very institutions that protect us so they may stand untouched upon our ruins.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds have been cut from the National Institutes of Health, threatening thousands of grants, even cutting from the indirect costs that support the electricity, lights and heat keeping our laboratories running.
I ask you to be honest with yourself — do you really believe those dismantling our public health will remain to suffer its collapse?Or have they already bought their escape routes, all while we remain gasping for air in our overcrowded emergency rooms, dying in the rubble of their wreckage.