To the editor:

I am hoping that you will consider publishing the following letter in The Connection.

I am a Registered Nurse with a BSN, MSN, and PhD. I am also a Professor Emerita of Nursing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, where I attended Yorktown High School. During my senior year, I participated in a work/study program in which I worked for 17 hours each week at Arlington Hospital as a nurse’s aide. This experience and the excellent education I received in the Arlington public schools had a lasting impact on my life and led me to a 45 year career in nursing. 

As a nursing professor I was actively engaged in research to study ways to improve care for preterm infants and for families. I received several grants from the National Institutes of Health, as well as from other organizations including the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. Several of my studies focused on identifying ways that parents could safely touch their extremely premature infants using gentle touch, since studies had shown that some types of touch resulted in agitation and decreases in oxygen levels and adverse changes in heart rate. Some of my other studies focused on evaluating teaching programs to promote positive parent-child interactions and lead to improved outcomes for both children and their families. 

I was also actively engaged in global health initiatives in many countries in Latin America and in Africa, including programs to improve nursing education and prepare nurses to address the HIV/AIDS crisis.

I am writing this letter to urge readers to call their Senators and ask them to oppose cuts to funding for biomedical research and global health. This funding is critical to supporting research to finding cures for diseases and for improving lives of people in the U.S. and around the world. The cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that are being proposed in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that is currently being debated will have devastating consequences for all of us. 

Lynda Law (Harrison) Wilson

Birmingham, Alabama 

formerly of Arlington, Virginia