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Anne Li                                                                                                 March 18th, 2017

Cancer researchers and advocacy groups are denouncing President Trump's proposed budget, warning that its 19 percent cut for the National Institutes of Health could cripple or kill former vice president Joe Biden’s cancer “moonshot” initiative and other important biomedical efforts. “Forget about the moonshot. What about everything on the ground?” said George Demetri, an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “Fundamentally, this is so extreme that all I can think is that it’s pushing two orders of magnitude off the grid so that when people come back to less extreme positions it looks normal.” Among people who work in the life sciences, Demetri said, “there is a stunned speechlessness.” The budget blueprint released Thursday did not include specific numbers for individual NIH institutes, such as the National Cancer Institute. Still, the proposed cuts represent a sharp turnaround from the Obama administration as well as congressional supporters, who pressed for more NIH funding in recent years. The Obama White House in particular pushed the moonshot initiative to try to accelerate progress against the disease.

See original article at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/03/17/proposed-federal-budget-would-devastate-cancer-research-advocates-say/?utm_term=.e3bff79bd467