Letter from Bonnie McGuire Jones

Cancer Research Cuts Hit Home

My husband, like many men in their 70s, has prostate cancer. Unlike many of them, however, his biopsy resulted in a Gleason score for which there are no research findings that point to the most effective treatment. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, a hospital and research center affiliated with Harvard Medical School, has been studying cancers like his.

We have made three trips to Dana-Farber since his biopsy. His treatments are being conducted by an MD/PhD whose lab can analyze his response to treatments and offer doctors even better “best practices” to treat the 250,000 men in America who are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year.

My husband’s treatments will conclude before summer, but his doctor may not have the opportunity to add my husband’s experience to life-saving research for the benefit of others. The Trump Administration has frozen $2.2 billion of research funding and is reviewing an additional $8.7 billion of research funding to Harvard University and its affiliated hospitals.

Defunding medical research is happening across the country, where doctors and medical researchers are coming up with discoveries for the treatment of cancer, dementia, heart disease, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, diseases that touch almost every American family. The administration is even defunding studies that are five years into seven-year terms. Is this research that DOGE claims is a waste of taxpayer dollars?

The administration has already fired, across the board and without concern for the urgency of the research, 25 percent of the staff of the National Institutes of Health, which identified my mother’s breast cancer and enabled her to live an additional 35 years; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which plays a crucial role in helping us respond to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases; and the Food and Drug Administration, which tests and bans, to the extent it is allowed, toxic elements in our food, water, air, homes, schools, and workplaces.

Health is our first wealth. Without health, no individual and no country can achieve what it is capable of.

Please use your voice to advocate strongly for the administration to restore funding to hospitals and medical research labs whose missions are to care for our health and that of our family, friends, communities, and those who have no voice. You have the right and the need to speak up. After all, the administration is using OUR taxpayer dollars to try to dismantle the mainstays of OUR healthcare.

Bonnie McGuire Jones
Town of Middlefield