NIH Funding

June 18th, 2008 Chris Posted in Uncategorized |

This is why people in biomedical field are screwed:

See that period in the 90’s, when the budget started to take off? That’s when new labs were built, programs were expanded, and lots of grad students were trained. Now, that all of those grad students have graduated, and are looking to start their own labs, the funding has plummeted. The result?

R01 grants, the foundation of research labs, are only getting funded at a rate of 20%. Sure, there are some grants don’t deserve funding, but thousands of other people doing quality work aren’t getting the money they need to make their research happen. More alarmingly, the average age of a researcher’s first R01 grant has skyrocketed to age 43. If you get out of grad school at 28, that means you’re spending 15 years stumbling from lab to lab in low-paying post-doc positions, trying to scrounge up enough money to get your work done. Gee, I went to school for 23 years for this??

How does this affect all you non-scientists out there? Well, as PZ Meyers points out simply and eloquently, biomedical research saves lives. Period. Ever known someone with cancer? Look at those survival rates and tell me that research money isn’t well spent.

We need to make it clear to our representatives in congress that science funding is a priority. Last year, the US spent 64% of it’s discretionary budget on the military - a total of over 632 billion dollars (this doesn’t even include supplemental spending on Iraq!). The irony of all this is that military dollars are supposed to be keeping Americans save and alive, but by moving even 1% of that into the NIH budget, we could ensure that a far greater number of people kept on living.

via DrugMonkey and NEJM