No President Tried to Lose the War on Cancer … Until TrumpThe story of a patient, a researcher, and MAGA’s assault on science.
JOBST BLACHY USED TO THINK THAT he and his wife were two of the luckiest people in the world—or, at least, as lucky as you can be when you’re racing the clock to beat cancer. Jobst’s wife (who asked that we not use her name) has a kind of lung cancer known to affect younger women who have never smoked. Doctors discovered it when she went to the emergency room because of difficult breathing and a racing heart they clocked at 230 beats per minute. At the time, she was in her forties and seemingly healthy—a full-time high school teacher and the mother of two teenage boys. Now, one physician told her, she had stage four cancer with probably no more than six months to live. Jobst, who runs a Los Angeles–area furniture business, says he was handling the news okay until he was speaking to a designer one night and broke down crying. But that was when the first stroke of luck hit. The designer had a contact at City of Hope, the world-famous cancer hospital just outside the city. There, Jobst’s wife was able to see a physician who had done pioneering research on the kind of cancer she had—and how to treat it. The doctor described newly developed drugs that had been working wonders, Jobst recalled in a phone interview last week. “He told us we didn’t need to worry,” Jobst said, “that he’d do the worrying for us.” And the doctor was right. Five years after her six-month prognosis, Jobst’s wife is very much alive, thanks to what would have qualified not long ago as a medical miracle.
But cancer is relentless: Even this new treatment is likely to stop working someday, because the tumor cells will “learn” to evade it. At that point, she’s going to need another miracle, which is why Jobst and his wife have been paying so much attention to the work of a researcher named David Shackelford. Shackelford and his team have been working on ways to create more scientifically detailed images of patient tumors, using artificial intelligence and the latest scanning technology. The idea is to figure out whether a cancer patient who has stopped responding to one drug might be sensitive to others—and, if not, to alter the biology of the tumors themselves, so they become sensitive. Jobst’s wife is precisely the sort of patient who could benefit. It was a chance meeting on a vacation that put Jobst and Shackelford together—another stroke of good fortune, Jobst felt. But now he worries that their luck is running out, and that his wife’s chances to benefit from those new studies are fading. That’s because Shackelford is at UCLA. And Donald Trump just cut off the school’s federal funding... Join The Bulwark to unlock the rest.Become a paying member of The Bulwark to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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