On Biden’s prostate cancer and dealing with disease “down there”

A diagnosis of prostate cancer is a kick in the proverbial slats. Really. You don’t want to hear the word, “cancer,” at all…anytime…ever. But if you’re male, the best time to hear it is after a blood test comes back with your PSA number unusually elevated. The PSA number isn’t in and of itself a diagnosis, but it gets your attention. Nobody wants to hear that there is a strong likelihood they’ve got cancer, but a high PSA number means that if you’ve got cancer, it’s down there, which lightens the diagnosis considerably. Joe Biden’s office announced on Sunday that he had been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer on Friday. They did not provide many details beyond that, other than to say the cancer had spread from the prostate to nearby bones.

Stage four prostate cancer is a 10 on the Gleason scale, which measures the severity of the disease, with 6 being the lowest score and 10 the highest. It's not a good diagnosis, but treatments have progressed to the point that it is not a death sentence. Specialists told the New York Times that with today’s treatments, Biden could be expected to live five to ten years after diagnosis and end up dying of natural causes rather than cancer of the prostate. One specialist noted that Biden’s “moonshot” program to reduce cancer deaths, begun when he was vice president after his son Beau’s death from a brain tumor in 2015, probably contributed to the advances in treatment for the disease from which he now suffers. As vice president, Biden negotiated with Republicans in Congress for a $264 million increase in funding for the National Cancer Institute. As president in 2024, Biden announced $150 million in new research grants to eight cancer research centers at universities around the country, including Dartmouth, Rice, and Johns Hopkins.

My diagnosis came in 2018, when I was 71, when a blood test came back with an elevated PSA. My urologist did a biopsy and confirmed that he found I had a mild-to-medium case, a seven on the Gleason scale, with little spots of cancerous cells throughout the prostate, which meant they had spread, but were not yet fast-growing. It was terrible to hear, but I felt lucky, because he said the PSA test had caught it early. The cancer could be treated one of three ways: by removing the prostate altogether, with chemo or with radiation. Surgery sounded pretty extreme, and the doctor explained that it wasn’t recommended, so I chose radiation.

First, however, I went through six months of treatments with testosterone blockers to lower my testicles’ ability to produce testosterone. This involved monthly shots that included androgen blockers that reduced any testosterone the testicles managed to produce after being hit with testosterone blockers. The thing about testosterone is that it feeds the prostate’s cancer cells, so by knocking down testosterone production, you are reducing the size and number of the cancer cells before radiation takes care of the rest of them.

Bye-bye chest hair, bye-bye pubic hair. Bye-bye sex drive.

The radiation treatments lasted three months, for five days a week, ten minutes under the gun each time. There were side effects. I won’t go into them in detail, but they were more than unpleasant. After all, everything down there is getting blasted for 50 minutes a week. Suffice to say, my stuff didn’t like it. Neither did I.

But the tradeoff was knocking down the cancer to the point it’s undetectable. The word “remission” didn’t have much meaning for me until I heard it from the lips of my urologist.

Something else I never paid much attention to when I saw it mentioned in headlines in the Times or on the cable news shows was funding for cancer research, or the blizzard of acronyms that came under the acronym, HHS, for the Department of Health and Human Services: NIH, FDA, CDC, NCI, NIA, NHGRI, NIBIB. Those letters stand for National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control, National Cancer Institute, National Institute for Aging, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

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To say that those letters catch my attention now is an understatement. It was reported last week that a Senate report found that funding for cancer research had been cut by 31 percent between January and April — 31 percent! The National Cancer Institute alone lost $300 million in funding compared to 2024. Its parent agency, National Institutes of Health, was cut by $2.7 billion. 1,660 grants to research institutions at universities and hospitals have been either eliminated altogether or cut significantly. In all, the Senate report found, $13.5 billion in health funding had been cut by DOGE and the Trump administration by April.

Sure, there have been stories that all of a sudden the new secretary of Health and Human Services realized he had cut too deeply and has been trying to rehire people to staff up the decimated NIH, and court decisions have reinstated a portion of the funding of research grants for universities. But there have also been stories reporting that the damage has been done, that health experts in many fields who were fired have moved on and are not going back to work for the federal departments of health that have been taken over by people recommending that the measles virus be treated with vitamins and antibiotics, neither of which are approved treatments for viruses such as measles.

Joe Biden, who did more for cancer research to find cures than any president in recent memory, will now benefit from some of the research that he promoted. While Donald Trump Jr. charges Jill Biden with “covering up” her husband’s illness – which was announced two days after he was diagnosed – and Donald Trump also questions the timing of Biden’s diagnosis, Trump has effectively thrown this country’s leadership in the realm of cancer research, medical imaging and biomedical cures into the trash. American researchers are taking jobs in Great Britain and Europe to carry on their search for cures.

We may have a trade deficit in manufactured goods, but we have a surplus when it comes to exporting talent in every area of medical research there is. The next generation of people who are diagnosed with cancer will have to look abroad for new cures, because four years of Donald Trump is likely to do 20 years of damage to the search for cures to cancer, heart disease, and ailments we thought we had eliminated such as measles, which are now being welcomed back to our shores by a federal government being run by quacks and charlatans.