JFK's granddaughter raises awareness of rare leukaemia with poignant essay

November 24, 2025

Tatiana Schlossberg, a 35-year-old member of the Kennedy family, recently published a powerful essay in The New Yorker revealing her terminal diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which doctors discovered after she gave birth to her second child in May 2024. Her particularly rare subtype of the disease, affecting only 1-2% of AML patients, has proven resistant to standard treatments including bone marrow transplants, chemotherapy, and experimental CAR-T cell therapy, leaving her with less than a year to live. In her essay, she criticized her cousin Robert F.

Who is affected

Tatiana Schlossberg (the patient with terminal AML)
Schlossberg's newborn daughter and second child
Her sister (who donated bone marrow and T-cells for treatment)
Other Kennedy family members who oppose RFK Jr.'s policies
Patients with acute myeloid leukemia, particularly those with rare subtypes
mRNA researchers and the broader cancer research community
Future cancer patients who may lose access to potential treatments due to funding cuts

What action is being taken

Schlossberg is undergoing treatment through a clinical trial involving CAR-T-cell therapy
Doctors are providing care to keep her alive
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is implementing cuts to research funding at the National Institutes of Health, including nearly half a billion dollars for mRNA vaccine research
Kennedy has revoked funding for hundreds of NIH research grants
Researchers and physicians are raising awareness about the need for increased cancer research funding

Why it matters

This case demonstrates that aggressive cancers can strike young, healthy individuals without warning and that even patients with access to the best medical care face poor outcomes when effective treatments don't exist for their specific cancer subtype. The timing is particularly significant because current federal funding cuts to mRNA research—which has potential applications for cancer treatment beyond respiratory viruses—are creating a "chilling effect" that discourages researchers from pursuing clinical trials for cancer vaccines. The situation underscores the critical need for sustained biomedical research investment to develop better screening tools and treatments, as the NIH's declining role as a global leader in research funding may prevent life-saving therapies from being discovered.

What's next

No explicit next steps stated in the article

Read full article from source: BBC