NIH Needs Additional Funds To Finance Research, Editorial States
Academic institutions have said that NIH, which has an annual budget of more than $29 billion, "cannot support all of the worthy research being proposed" and that "young scientists with the potential for breakthrough work are being frozen out," and the institutions "are likely right," a New York Times editorial states. According to the editorial, the percentage of NIH grant proposals that "get financed has dropped from one in three early in the decade to one in four," and the average age of researchers "when they get their first NIH grant has risen to 43."
Between 1998 and 2003, the NIH budget doubled, a move that "helped spur completion of the human genome project and led to new diagnostic tests and therapies for a variety of diseases," the editorial states. Since that time, however, the NIH budget "has been essentially flat," with a 13% decrease in "purchasing power" after adjustment for increased research costs, the editorial states. "There is no easy way out" of the problem, but "it seems foolish to waste the talent and laboratories that have been built up over the last decade," the editorial states, adding, "Biology may be the most rapidly progressing of the sciences, and an aging population and a too costly health care system would benefit from better and cheaper treatments."
The editorial concludes, "Congress needs to provide the NIH with enough money to keep up with biomedical inflation and preferably somewhat more," and the "government and research institutions need to do better with what they get" (New York Times, 3/16).
