Practically overnight, in March 2002, my body stopped working right. I sweated through a week-long fever and then everything went sideways. I felt dizzy all the time and had heart palpitations. I was suddenly unable to compute basic figures, and my hand would refuse to write things down, like my brain was sending scrambled signals.

The month before, I had been a healthy 28-year-old. I had pedaled my ratty bike everywhere around town, spent breaks backpacking and ate a nutrient-packed vegetarian diet. I had just enrolled to pursue a Ph.D. in earth science, inspired by the Downeast Maine landscapes I grew up exploring, and excited by the prospect of physically demanding expeditions to the Arctic.

After months of tests, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. The delay gave the bacteria time to bore deep into my body’s tissues. Of the nearly half a million Americans who contract Lyme each year, about 14% have debilitating long-term symptoms. By the time I found a doctor who knew how to treat long-established Lyme, I had become a case of what is called post-treatment Lyme disease — a chronic illness poorly understood by science and therefore mysterious to treat.

Thankfully, aggressive cocktails of antibiotics made me functional again. I earned my Ph.D. and established a career as a professor. I gave birth to a healthy child. But every day involves carefully managing chronic fatigue — a misnomer that glosses over the bone-deep physical misery and scary neurological symptoms that arise if I decide simply to walk all the way across campus or socialize two nights in a row.

Our new secretary of health and human services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., talks a lot about healthy eating and exercise. Certainly, America would be healthier if our leaders prioritized making health care accessible and wholesome food affordable for everyone. Instead, the budget passed by the House and now sitting with the Senate would cut Medicaid and family food assistance, hurting many Mainers.

Meanwhile, many sick people like me need more than healthy living: we need medical breakthroughs that begin in university research labs. But recent political attacks on science and universities are crushing any hope for cures — not just for my illness but for all of them, from cancer to Alzheimer’s to rare childhood diseases.

I felt a surge of hope recently. A Northwestern University co-worker I have never met, bacteriologist Professor Brandon Jutras, identified an antibiotic that kills Lyme with unique efficiency. His team also discovered that the Lyme bacterium’s cell wall is made of a peculiar molecule, which breaks down into debris that lodges itself in the livers of Lyme-infected lab mice and could finally explain why some Lyme infections cause long-term symptoms like mine.

“We may be able to disrupt this … allowing patients to return to health,” the paper concluded, referring to potential cures that could come from follow-up research. Hope!

Then I realized that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense fund Jutras’ research, and my hope evaporated. In an ongoing battle with U.S. universities, the Trump administration recently and without explanation cut off all HHS funding to Northwestern, which includes the NIH, partnerships with the Department of Defense and, by extension, the Jutras lab.

In 2024, the NIH funded research in labs around the country, addressing the full range of American health problems for a cost of far less than 1% of the federal budget. (Americans spend more than 100 times as much on health care.) Studying every known illness yields too small a payoff at its most fundamental stages to be a practical investment for companies. This is exactly the kind of job we need our federal government for.

In the words of Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, “There is no investment that pays greater dividends to American families than our investment in biomedical research.” For example, a 2020 study found that every one of the 356 new drugs approved by the FDA from 2010-2019 was developed on the foundation of research funded by the NIH. Importantly, NIH-funded university labs also train our homegrown biotech innovators and pharmaceutical workforce.

So it is a travesty that across the U.S. — including at the University of Maine, University of New England and Maine Medical Center  — DOGE-induced funding cuts and chaos have been hobbling the NIH. Even worse, the budget working its way through Congress would cut science back to the bone, reducing the NIH budget by about 40% at a time when everything is getting more expensive. As Sen. Collins recently pointed out in a Senate hearing, that includes a 40% cut to the National Institute of Aging, which would hit people in Maine — our nation’s oldest state — especially hard.

To every Mainer who wants a healthy future, or a cure for a loved one’s disease: you can make a difference. Sen. Collins has real power over the federal budget. Call her and demand that she protect funding for the National Institutes of Health and scientific research.

My future health depends on it, and there’s a strong chance yours will, too.