For example, the use of genetic markers to figure out how to treat different cancers was first proposed in the early 1990s and is now a highly successful clinical method.
Really? Can you point to a paper demonstrating it's better than classifying cancers the way histologists did in the 80s? Everything I've seen says that it just reconstructs the same classification. But it took ten years for the geneticists to admit that. I've seen more recent genetic classification that might be better than the old ones, but they didn't bother to compare to the old genetic classifications, let alone the histology.
HER2 receptor. These days those with breast cancer that overexpresses this growth factor receptor tend to get monoclonal antibodies against it, which both suppress its growth effects and tag it for disruption by the immune system.
Yes, this is a protein test rather than a genetic test. But it lets the subset of people with this amplification get a treatment that has a large positive absolute effect on those with early-stage cancer.
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)