The timing of this is almost cruel. The article mentions that the overall survival rate for all cancers just hit 70% for the first time — the result of decades of continuous investment. Daraxonrasib is literally the product of that accumulation. And it's exactly now, when science is finally "paying off" 40 years of KRAS research, that the funding tap gets turned off.
What worries me isn't just the budget cuts. It's the proposal to put political appointees in charge of approving scientific grants. That's not reform, that's capture. Peer review exists precisely to remove ego and agenda from the equation. When you politicize that filter, you're not just wasting public money: you're actively poisoning the process through which discoveries like this one emerge.
And the worst part is that the damage is invisible. Nobody will be able to point to the cancer that wasn't cured in 2045 because a study wasn't funded in 2026. It's a perfect crime against public health.
Ben Sasse, a Republican who is currently taking daraxonrasib, called it a "miracle drug." But miracles have a resume, and this one starts with federal funding back in the 1980s.
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