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Crumbling Crown—The Collapse of America’s Research Backbone
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Released: May 28, 2025

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD
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Crumbling Crown: The Collapse of America’s Research Backbone

 

John Marshall, MD: How's your week been this week? What's the federal government done to you in your world this week? I've been doing a little bit of math and I've been tracking my patients coming through clinic, and yes, I'm in Washington DC, So, my numbers are going to be higher than yours are in this regard. But right now, about one out of every five patients I'm seeing has been directly affected by changes in employment due to the changes that the government's putting into place. One in five. Either they've lost their job, they chose the fork in the road, or they're feeling eminently threatened by their current job status. Their current job status is vulnerable, if you will.

 

I sit in section 309 at the Nats Park. I have a half season. I'm there a lot. I drink an occasional beer while I am there. Baseball is my escape. The nice woman who sits right behind me, who's been sitting there for years as well. She, every time I go to a game, is there, and I said, did it happen? And so, last night I was at the game, and she said, no, not yet, but she thinks this week. So, it's everywhere around us, this dramatic downsizing that's just sort of sweeping the country, and we don't really know how it's going to have an impact on any of us going forward.

 

Now we, in the academic world, we in the cancer world are feeling this in a dramatic way. So, we have discussions every week at the leadership level of will grants continue to exist? Will funded grants be paid? We have examples where they have been withdrawn, right? I happen to know if somebody who was offered a cancer job at a prominent, stable, large, old academic institution withdrew the offer because they were uncertain about future budgetary issues because of the changes in grants. I've never seen that happen in my 35 years of being a faculty member. So, clearly a change in the world. you start thinking about the job that we have, this drug development and new discoveries. How will we go forward? Let's say I'm industry. How can I reliably continue to invest in this front? When I'm not sure how things are gonna go. If I'm an investigator based at an academic institution, how do I decide that that's a logical career path forward for my brain and my intellect if I don't know that there'll be this source of funding to do the research, to set the standard, to change the standard of care?

 

In many ways, what we're hearing is that the United States is becoming increasingly irrelevant and untrustworthy for sure. The whole point of what we established in establishing the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute was to be the gold standard, to be the rock that was always going to be there, to be the constant stream of new data and new resources that will the actual improvements in many diseases, not just cancer. We know that that's why people would come and want to train here. So, the best brains on the planet would wanna come and train and be trained by us here in the United States because of this resource. And, of course, all of this is going away.

 

The Georgetown University faculty, my daughter, who is my sage. Yesterday, that our faculty, I somehow missed the memo, is now gonna hold a weekly vigil for one of our graduate students who was deported because according to the federal government, his visa status was not right. But really, we know it was because the research he was doing was not in line with what the current administration feels is important.

 

I don't know if you saw this, but the New England Journal editor in chief received what was perceived to be kind of a threatening letter basically accusing them of not publishing "competing viewpoints." A randomized clinical trial. Patient got treatment A versus treatment B, and the accusation is that the authors may be misleading the readers. So, is this an assumption that the science was fraud? Is it an assumption that there's a counterpoint to their hypothesis that was not listed in the science? I don't know. I don't even know where it comes from. So, this is where we are, is that the federal government is trying to undermine the veracity, the solidness, stableness of the data being presented by the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the journals that we have in highest regard, and it is their strategy, of course, right, is to doubt, to cause doubt, in things that we hold, to be the solid base and the truth, if you will.

 

Now, you all know that, talked about before on Oncology Unscripted this, this concept that the federal government sent Harvard a letter, which we talked about already, that basically said, we're freezing your funding. So, $2.2 billion of funding to Harvard has been frozen with an additional billion dollars in grants. And basically, threatening the education of international students. They're talking about removing Harvard's tax status.

 

And, of course, Harvard is the one group that has quite publicly stood up and essentially said, look, you don't have the rights to do this. And their president, Harvard's president, wrote this response, and I do wanna read it to you in specific.

 

It says the consequences of the government's overreach will be severe and long lasting. Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease are on the horizon. The government's saying, "no, we don't wanna know that." And the victims, will be the future patients, so writes their president. And their loved ones who will suffer with a heartbreak of illness that might have been prevented or treated more effectively.

 

So, this indiscriminate slashing of science, medical technology research is essentially undermined our role and our ability to help, not just Americans, but people around the world. The accusation, again said by Alan Garber, who's the president of Harvard is that this was the government's reaction to the university, Harvard being antisemitic Alan Garber is Jewish and American, and he basically says, look, we understand our role in all of this. They take their work very seriously, and they'll continue to fight hate with an urgency that it demands. And they will comply with all their obligations under the law they say, he says, it's not only their legal responsibility, it's their moral imperative. Such a strong pushback counter statement to that.

 

But then, you know, our Secretary of Education? No, you don't know who that is, but She's become famous really for a couple of things. One, she was at an AI meeting. She kept referring to it, because she can't read the teleprompter as A-one. Which of course the reason you know this is that every steak sauce joke in America comes from this statement, statement, this lack of understanding of even where she was.

 

But then she also was, in theory, the signatory or author of a response to Dr. Garber at Harvard for his letter that he had just sent, that I quoted there. And if you haven't seen this, this has been getting a lot of social media press just because of the quality of writing. You would think that our Secretary of Education could write a letter, particularly if you're writing it to somebody at Harvard that at least is grammatically correct, if not at least readable and understandable. But as you can see, and as I'm sure you have seen on social media, the people in charge aren't up to the game.

 

And that's how they're doing this. They're undermining education. They're undermining those sources that are our foundation of knowledge of truth, So, that we can get on with curing cancer or whatever it is that our cause is. But by undermining us, causing doubt on us, they can then bring their agenda forward.

 

And I want to restate what I've shown you before is that there is an ad out there. claiming that the current administration under the President's leadership will cure cancer by 2029. why does it matter what we do? Why does it matter where truth resides? Because the real truth is gonna come forward over the next four years, and we will no longer have to worry about cancer.

 

In the meantime, I hope to see you at ASCO in Chicago, and I hope you continue to do the right thing, to build truth, to build for the future because we know it's gonna be back on our shoulders soon, and in fact, the load will be heavier when it's back on our shoulders. So, be in shape, get ready because it is gonna come back to us to solve the problems.

 

John Marshall, Oncology Unscripted.