Discussion:
Trump said the US spent $8m on transgender mice - he was right
(too old to reply)
Incompetent Ass Karen Bass
2025-03-09 08:29:11 UTC
Permalink
President refers to non-profit investigating taxpayer-funded experiments
on the effects of gender-affirming drugs in rodents

Donald Trump on Tuesday told Congress Elon Musk had rooted out “hundred
of billions of dollars” worth of government waste thanks to Doge.

Reeling off a long list of examples of apparent misspending, Mr Trump
said that $45 million had been spent on diversity, equity, and inclusion
scholarships in Burma, $20 million on the Arab version of Sesame Street
– and “$8 million for making mice transgender”.

“This is real,” he said.

Left-wing media outlets were quick to dismiss the claims as
misinformation. After the White House released a statement branding CNN
“fake news losers”, the outlet issued a correction to its fact check of
Mr Trump’s speech, stating that “an earlier version of this item
incorrectly characterised as false Trump’s claim”.

The president was referring to an investigation by the White Coat Waste
Project, a non-profit campaigning to stop animal testing, which
investigates taxpayer-funded experiments on the effects of
gender-affirming drugs in rodents.


Justin Goodman, senior vice-president for the lobbying group, claimed it
has documented “over $250 million spent on transgender animal
experiments over the last couple of decades”.

He added that “there are over two dozen active federal grants funding
transgender animal experiments, worth a total of $64 million”.

These include a National Institute of Health (NIH) funded project at
Duke University that allegedly received $455,000 to study how HIV
vaccines work in male mice subjected to female hormones – to imitate
human gender transitions.

In another experiment, scientists at the University of Michigan
allegedly spent $2,588,000 of an NIH grant investigating the effects of
hormone treatment in mice to imitate gender transition.

A further experiment at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre
allegedly spent $300,000 investigating breast cancer risk for
transgender people by looking at tumours in mice.

A study at Emory University funded by NIH also allegedly spent $735,000
evaluating the contribution of the gut microbiome towards gender
affirming hormone therapy in mice.

A researcher at Emory said: “We study the effects of the hormone
treatment used by transgender people on skeletal development. We want to
know if these hormones impair skeletal growth and increase the
probability of osteoporosis later in life.”

They added that the experiments are conducted in “normal mice”.

Male sex hormone treatment on female mice
Meanwhile, scientists at the University of California are alleged to
have spent $1,229,000 of NIH money looking at the effects of male sex
hormone treatment on female mice.

A final experiment at Indiana University, funded by $3,100,000 of NIH
money, looked into the effects of feminising hormone therapy on the
lungs of rodents.

Representatives for the White Coat Waste Project testified at a February
House Oversight Committee meeting chaired by Nancy Mace, in which the
South Carolina congresswoman used the examples of gender experiments on
animals to underscore concerns about government waste.

The watchdog’s representatives alleged that 95 per cent of the federal
funding comes from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases.

Mr Musk recently called government spending on research into the effects
of hormone treatment on animals “demented” in an episode of the Joe
Rogan Experience podcast.

The Tesla billionaire said the scientists were “mutilating animals”,
describing the experiments as the “worst thing you can possibly imagine
from a horror show”.

Elon Musk
Elon Musk said the scientists were ‘mutilating animals’ Credit: Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images North America
During his first term, Mr Trump moved to restrict animal testing, with
the Environmental Protection Agency announcing plans to end the practice
by 2035.

However, the agency reportedly abandoned its plans last year amid
concerns that testing chemicals on animals remains the safest means of
reducing harm to humans.

Mr Goodman said: “We’re absolutely thrilled and honoured that the
president highlighted our investigation during the state of the union
and helped us expose wasteful government spending that’s torturing
animals in grotesque experiments.

“I think that these experiments are a great example of DEI programmes
run amok, where programmes that claim to be intended to help
marginalised people are being exploited to torture animals in sick
experiments that only benefit the mad scientists conducting them.

“I think most taxpayers agree that money should not be spent to perform
hormone therapies on lab animals to make them transgender.”

In a statement on its website, CNN said its story had been updated with
context about the spending, “which was for research studies on the
potential human health impacts of treatments used in gender-affirming care”.

Some scientists have raised concerns that Mr Trump’s comments have
misled the public into believing that the studies on mice are only for
modelling transgender hormone replacement.

One scientist said that experiments on mice have improved our
understanding of the impact of sex hormones on a whole range of conditions.

They pointed to raloxifene, a medication used to treat osteoporosis in
postmenopausal women, which they said would not have been available
without years of studying the effects of hormones on rodents.

Duke University, the University of Michigan, Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Centre, the University of California and Indiana University were
approached for comment.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/06/trump-said-us-spent-8m-dollars-trans-mice-he-was-right/
Lawrence D'Oliveiro
2025-03-09 21:57:05 UTC
Permalink
They're pretty open about minor and major fuck-ups, IME.
Name one instance where Microsoft admitted to a fault at the same time, or
even before, it was independently reported.

Remember, their status page runs on the same infrastructure as all the
rest of their cloud. So if one goes down, the other stops working, too.
Steve Watts
2025-03-10 01:00:45 UTC
Permalink
It was 'Transgenic' mice for cancer research you stupid ignorant TrumpFUCK.

Never under estimate the stupidity of trumpers and their media.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2025/03/07/this-is-whats-behind-
the-uproar-over-transgenic-mice/
Orkay
2025-03-10 01:03:08 UTC
Permalink
Post by Incompetent Ass Karen Bass
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
English tabloids informing the weak American right wing mind.
What could possibly go wrong? LOL!


This Is What’s Behind Trump’s Uproar Over ‘Transgender Mice’

A "transgenic mouse," the first animal to be granted a patent by the U.S.
Patent Office, rests on a ... [+] hand in a laboratory at the Harvard
Medical school on April 15, 1988, in Boston. AFP PHOTO VIN CATANIA (Photo
credit should read VIN CATANIA/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images

During his State of the Union address on March 4, Donald Trump alleged that
the Biden administration had spent $8 million “for making mice
transgender.”

It turns out that the bizarre line from Trump’s speech was actually about
the use of transgenic mice to study the safety of hormone treatments often
given to transgender people (and that, not the use of mice, is what the
administration objects to). Transgenic mice are mice with modified DNA,
which biomedical researchers use to study how genes impact disease and
health, or how human diseases and organs might respond to medications.
Since transgenic mice are enjoying a brief moment in the spotlight, here’s
a look at their history and why they matter.

Biologists refer to the mouse as a “model organism,” because they can use
lab mice as models to study how diseases develop, how treatments work and
how genes affect those processes. Researchers rely heavily on transgenic
mice in particular for cancer research, and these mice also help study the
role genes play in conditions like aging, Alzheimer’s disease, asthma,
diabetes, heart disease and Parkinson’s disease.

It started with a virus (a tale as old as time, or at least as old as life
on Earth). Simian virus 40 normally lives in wild rhesus monkeys — and in
biology labs, where researchers have used it to study how DNA gets
transcribed and copied. (Some viruses carry their genetic code on a single-
stranded molecule called RNA, but SV40 and some other viruses use DNA.)

One day in 1974, embryologist Beatrice Mintz and geneticist Rudolf Jaenisch
inserted SV40 into the cells of a mouse embryo. As the embryo’s cells grew
and divided, they copied not just their own DNA, but the DNA of the virus,
too. The mouse eventually born in Mintz’s and Jaenisch’s lab carried viral
DNA in every cell of its body. It was the first transgenic organism: the
first animal born carrying DNA from another species alongside its own.

A few years after Mintz and Jaenisch’s experiment, a team of researchers at
Yale University figured out how to create transgenic mice that would pass
their modified genes along to their young. By the 1980s, biologists could
change or remove individual genes in their mice, making it possible to
breed mice with whatever genetic traits researchers needed.

Transgenic mice made it possible for scientists to study the role specific
genes play in the body — sometimes by replacing a mouse gene with a human
version, or sometimes by switching off the gene altogether to see what
happens if it doesn’t work (these are called knockout mice, and they’re a
staple of medical lab research).

In 2013, researchers in the U.K. added firefly genes to transgenic mice.
When the mouse’s body activates a gene that’s involved in suppressing
cancer cells, the firefly genes cause the affected area of the mouse’s body
to light up. Other studies have also used firefly DNA to help track when
certain genes switch on and off in mice.

(It’s worth a side note that Mintz, born in New York City in 1921, was the
daughter of Jewish immigrants from what’s now Ukraine, but was then part of
Austria. Had her parents remained in Europe, it’s reasonably likely that
she wouldn’t have lived long enough to develop the transgenic mice that
have helped scientists save countless lives since.)
No, This is Not About Transgender Mice

So why did transgenic mice come under fire during the State of the Union
address? At first, it looked like the president, or his speechwriters, had
simply mixed up the words “transgender” and “transgenic.” But on March 5,
the White House repeated the claim that the National Institute of Health
had funded six grants “for institutions across the country to perform
transgender experiments on mice.”

All six grants actually focused on the safety of various hormone
treatments, not on whether it was possible to make mice transgender. In
particular, the six studies investigated how hormone therapy impacts things
like breast cancer risks, response to HIV vaccines, asthma symptoms and
fertility.

“There is a considerable gap in knowledge," wrote one team of researchers,
which received a $455,000 grant to study how hormone therapy affects
people’s response to HIV vaccines, "surrounding the immunological
responsiveness of transgender people, a population at considerably higher
risk for HIV and other STIs.”
Pocket Change

The total amount of these grants was listed as $8,290,053 — about a
millionth of a percent of total federal spending in fiscal year 2024 (or
less than a tenth the cost of a single F-35 fighter). With an estimated 1.4
million transgender adults living in the United States, that’s an
investment of about $5.85 per person.

And the single biggest grant — $3.1 million for a study of “gonadal
hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma” — is about
women in general, not only transgender people. Indiana University lung
disease researcher Patricia Silveyra and her colleagues used the money to
investigate how estrogen affects lung inflammation in asthma patients.
Symptoms of asthma often get worse in women after puberty, but biologists
aren’t yet sure of the molecular mechanics behind the trend.

"Asthma is more prevalent and severe in young boys, but there is a gender-
switch at puberty, which has been related to increase of sex hormones,"
wrote pulmonologists Joe Zein and Serpil Erzurum of the Cleveland Clinic in
a 2016 study in the journal Current Allergy Asthma Reports. "After puberty,
a gender switch occurs, and asthma becomes more prevalent and severe in
women." Solving the estrogen puzzle could improve treatments for people
with asthma (both cisgender and transgender).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2025/03/07/this-is-whats-behind-
the-uproar-over-transgenic-mice/

Loading...