Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is reportedly helping Trump choose who will be in charge of health in the next administration. Recently, when asked what he would do if he had a magic wand, Kennedy said, “We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on Jan. 20 so that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH [the National Institutes of Health], and 600 people are going to leave.”

In other words, Kennedy is prepared to gut the National Institutes of Health, which is the largest funder of health research in the world, by immediately replacing experienced and qualified workers with his own people.

There was a time when advances in health were seen as optional. In 1969, the philosopher Hans Jonas argued that society did not need research on many health conditions. Jonas felt that........

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