After being diagnosed with cancer, Biden faces a private battle after a lifetime in the public eye | Editorial
The kind of science and medical research funding the former president long championed now offers him hope in his cancer fight.
Throughout his long and consequential public life, former President Joe Biden has overcome a series of personal hardships and professional hurdles.
He struggled since childhood with a stutter, lost his wife and 13-month-old daughter in a car crash in 1972, suffered two life-threatening brain aneurysms in the 1980s, lost his oldest son to brain cancer in 2015, and watched another son and daughter battle addiction.
Biden was among the youngest ever elected to the U.S. Senate at age 29, and then the oldest elected president at 78. In between, there were two failed presidential bids in 1988 and 2008 and eight years as vice president.
Now, after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, Biden faces a fight for his life. Doctors said the Stage 4 diagnosis is serious, but offered hope that it is treatable — thanks to medical advancements that have dramatically increased survival rates in the last decade.
Therein lies one of the many differences that will forever separate Biden, 82, from his political rival, Donald Trump, 78 — even while the two are forever linked in history. Beyond supporting the Constitution and the rule of law, Biden believes in research and higher education.
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The medical advancements that give Biden and many other patients hope have come thanks to decades of major investments by the federal government in medical research, most of it taking place on university campuses. That collaboration has helped to advance human health, strengthen national security, and drive America’s global competitiveness.
The National Institutes of Health, the main federal agency for medical research, provides about $8 billion a year in cancer science funding in the U.S. That investment has helped to save millions of lives, as cancer death rates in the U.S. have fallen by more than 33% since 1991.
Biden long championed research funding. In 2016, as vice president, he launched the so-called cancer moon shot that was aimed at finding cures for the deadly disease. In 2021, Biden announced billions in new funding to speed treatments.
NIH funding provides economic benefits in addition to the medical breakthroughs by adding $69 billion to America’s gross domestic product and supporting seven million jobs.
Trump, on the other hand, has reduced funding for medical research. In just a few months since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has cut $2.7 billion in NIH funding.
Trump’s budget proposed even deeper cuts, including slashing funding for the NIH by roughly 40% and the National Science Foundation by 56%.
Most of the research that led to the medical breakthroughs over the past half century or so has taken place in labs on college campuses, fueled, in part, by more than one million foreign students. But now, foreign students — who as a group have been targeted by Trump — are rethinking coming to the U.S.
It shows how Biden and Trump charted different paths.
Biden fought to combat climate change. He supported gun safety laws. He backed civil rights and equal rights for women. He stood up for average workers and human rights. He backed NATO allies and opposed dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Trump has been on the wrong side of history in every one of those fights.
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Biden pushed to make higher education more affordable by increasing Pell Grants for low-income students and adding thousands of additional visas for foreign students. He provided billions in COVID-19 relief funds to universities and added $1.3 billion in funding for historically Black colleges and universities. Biden proposed making community college free, but Republicans in Congress blocked it.
Meanwhile, Trump has declared war on higher education — a pillar of excellence that has long distinguished the United States. Trump has taken direct aim at Ivy League universities, but his proposed cuts will impact state colleges in red states, as well.
Trump’s proposals would cut billions from the U.S. Department of Education and eliminate funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, AmeriCorps, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Trump’s higher education cuts have prompted many universities to implement hiring freezes, layoffs, and pauses in research.
Those cuts have real-world implications.
For example, the University of Pennsylvania, the largest private employer in Philadelphia, announced a hiring freeze and review of all capital spending, which could impact construction jobs and other businesses that benefit from that spending.
Penn scientists also discovered the mRNA technology that paved the way for the COVID vaccines that saved millions of lives and led to a Nobel Prize. Research funding also led to the recent breakthrough at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where doctors used a custom gene editing treatment to save a baby from a rare disease.
Biden left Trump an economy that, just last October, the Economist magazine called the envy of the world. In just a few short months, Trump has rattled financial markets, weakened the dollar, and upended global trade.
Trump’s reckless tariff policy and irresponsible budget — which would add nearly $4 trillion to the deficit as it enshrines tax cuts for the wealthiest — prompted Moody’s to downgrade the U.S. credit rating.
Trump, the king of debt, could leave America morally and financially bankrupt. But the media horde in Washington are more obsessed over a book that argues Biden’s inner circle hid his physical decline from the public.
No doubt, the country would have been better off if Biden announced early on that he would only serve one term. But an aging Biden towered over an addled Trump. Anyone wanting to debate mental acuity should read Trump’s social media posts.
Biden was in the public arena for more than half a century. He now faces a private battle. It will be up to average Americans to carry on Biden’s good fight.