Before we mock “shrimp on treadmills” or “marbles in cats,” remember: we once studied Gila monster spit and it led a drug that’s now reshaping modern medicine.

How many influencers & politicians perpetuating memes actually read the studies? Probably none.

So I’ll do it for you. Let’s start with the shrimp.

Yes, scientists really put shrimp on a tiny treadmill and no it wasn’t to see how fast a shrimp can run.

The science behind it is surprisingly important.

“Make no mistake, if Congress enacts the President’s skinny budget, the consequences for the future of our nation would be catastrophic. The United States will no longer be in the global race for R&D leadership—we will have lost it.” “Economic benefits will accrue to other nations. We will lose the ability to set standards, influence priorities, attract and retain talent, and determine the outcomes for the health, prosperity and security of our nation.”

Wow. The Trump administration’s proposed FY2026 budget calls for a 1/3 cut to HHS and a 40% cut to NIH - with an unprecedented reduction in funding from $47B to $27B and collapsing 27 institutes into 8. More below. Among the NIH institutes marked for elimination:
National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institute for Nursing Research, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Entire research areas, from child development to environmental risks, would disappear.

I've noticed alot of people don’t realize how deeply medical innovation in this country depends on the NIH. From cancer immunotherapy to vaccines to obesity drugs like GLP-1s: it all starts with public funding. Here's a quick primer on the treatment pipeline in case helpful. NIH doesn’t make drugs. It funds the foundational science that makes them possible - discovering how diseases work, what molecules matter, and where to intervene. It’s the riskiest part of the pipeline, long before anything is profitable.

“I’m running out of time. I know that.”- Mark Chambers, 66, facing bile duct cancer and hoping for access to a clinical trial. His words stopped me cold. This is what NIH cuts actually mean. Not politics. People. I’ve spent years working to accelerate cancer innovation. I know how fragile and how powerful the pipeline from research to treatment really is. When you delay science, you delay survival.

There’s an enormous amount of disinformation flying around about NIH right now, so let’s clear a few things up. The NIH is not Big Pharma. It doesn’t make drugs, it doesn’t set public health agendas, and it doesn’t profit from your illness. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. It funds science to understand how our bodies work and how diseases develop-not to push products or profit.

Distilling the potential impact of science based on a title is so dangerous. Some of the biggest biomedical breakthroughs came from research that, at first glance, seemed ‘pointless or unrelated. Here are a few that I'm sure might have caused an uproar in the headlines: Glowing jellyfish: Seemed random until it led to Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), now a game-changer in cancer research, neuroscience, & vaccine development (almost everyone I know has used GFP in their research) Oh, and it won a Nobel Prize.

I’ve spent the last two weeks being introspective on twitter - partly because I have struggled to find the right words to say. And then it hit me - MY privilege is that I get to worry about words, when others worry about their lives. 1/ I was born and raised during apartheid in South Africa - yet another atrocity against black humanity at the hands of white people. Part of me has felt who am I to speak about these things - but now I realize - who would I be IF I DIDNT. 2/