No. of Recommendations: 15
Caleb Strickland, 4, has an artificial heart pump keeping him alive while he waits for a transplant.
Well, tough, Caleb, Trumpedo and Secretary Brainworm are pulling the funding from James Antaki, a biomedical engineer at Cornell University in New York, who has been developing PediaFlow, an implantable artificial heart the size of a AA battery for the littlest, most vulnerable humans for the last two decades.
Caleb is in heart failure after a virus in the spring wreaked havoc on his already weak heart.
Antaki's lab has been shut down for six months because his project's funding has been frozen. During that time, his grad students have left and his key technician on the project was laid off.
About 1 in 100 children in the U.S. is born with a congenital heart defect. But for babies or young kids with the most serious ailments, there is no artificial heart specifically designed for them. The Food and Drug Administration has identified this as an area of critical medical device need.
But in April, the Trump administration canceled Antaki's federal grant as part of a sweeping punishment of elite colleges and universities for what it considers civil rights violations and failures to counter antisemitism on campus. In total, about $10 billion in grants were canceled, including roughly $250 million for Cornell.PediaFlow was in the final stages of research and manufacturing before clinical trials, the key word being "was".
Letting 4-year-old children die is certainly "a sweeping punishment"... a Ninth Circle of Hell kind of punishment.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/09/nx-s1-5498641/child... 