Where’s the Biomed Bailout?
NIH Funding and the Research Recession
SOURCE: iStockphoto, SP
Congress last week passed a continuing resolution that will keep the National Institutes of Health budget flat-out flat for the fifth year running. The policy is flat-out wrong, as Americans who have diseases that five or ten years from now should be curable are going to have to wait a lot longer.
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Weiss’s Notebook
CAP Senior Fellow Rick Weiss covered science and medicine for The Washington Post for 15 years, and now he brings his investigative eye to science policy. From cloning and stem cells to agricultural biotechnology and nanotechnology, Weiss examines the issues at the intersection of cutting edge research and public policy.
The housing market wasn’t the only bubble to get pricked of late. Consider the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the primary source of funding for U.S. biomedical researchers. It, too, has recently had the rug pulled out from under it. And while the negative impacts may not be as obvious or immediate as the fallout from the housing, credit and stock market crises, the repercussions of this pound-foolish parsimony promise to be massive.
Recall that between 1998 and 2003 the NIH budget underwent a long-overdue expansion. In a remarkable act of bipartisan solidarity—and reflecting a broad appreciation that biomedical research is both an economic pump-primer and the best first step to conquering diseases—Congress doubled the agency’s budget over those five fiscal years.
Even more important than bolstering the work of hotshot scientists across the country, the move opened the doors to a new generation of young researchers with fresh ideas and enthusiasm. Laboratories grew. Scientists launched ambitious projects. And American leadership in the biomedical sciences seemed assured well into the future.
Then, immediately following that enlightened surge, something strange happened. It all stopped. The money dried up. Through the fiscal 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 budgets—and again this year in 2008—the NIH was flat-funded. And despite a rising tide of concern, it looks like the same fate will recur in 2009.
A higher and higher percentage of grant proposals—more than 80 percent at last count—now go unfunded.
In fact, Congress last week passed a continuing resolution to keep the Department of Health and Human Services (of which NIH is part) operating for the first five months of fiscal 2009, which began October 1. Within that legislation is an NIH research budget that, once again, is flat-out flat.
But it is worse than that. Because as everyone who has tried to keep up with rising food prices knows, flat is not flat at all. Modest increases would be needed simply to keep up with inflation. And the inflation rate for research is higher than it is for the general economy. So for all its so-called flatness, the NIH research budget has actually now dipped to an inflation-adjusted level about 13 percent less than it was five years ago, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The impact has been insidious. For one thing, a higher and higher percentage of grant proposals—more than 80 percent at last count—now go unfunded. This in turn has a perverse effect not only on the research pipeline but also on the careers of countless scientists who, during those halcyon millennial years, were wooed into the fraternity of experimentation and discovery.
Like cars hitting their brake lights on the Washington beltway as they come upon a rush-hour traffic jam, scientists who have just gotten up to speed on projects taking aim at humankind’s greatest causes of suffering—diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and infectious diseases—have had to stop what they were doing, scramble for temporary funding from their universities or research institutes, and in many cases start looking for other work. For those who stick with it, as postdocs or other underlings laboring in the low-paid laboratorial labyrinth, the years tick by with little in the way of rewards.
The average scientist today does not win a first federal research grant until he or she is nearly 42 years old. In 1970, that age was 34.
The implications of this recession go deeper yet. Think about which grants are most likely to be funded in such a situation: The ones that are most likely to pay off. Meaning, the ones that are in many cases the least imaginative, and the most derivative.
“People don’t take as many risks,” says Jerry Chi-Ping Yin, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of many scientists to decry the current situation in a report from earlier this year, “Within Our Grasp—Or Slipping Away?” compiled by a group of universities and research institutions. “You can’t afford to swing the bat and miss too many times.”
Meanwhile, that report notes, other countries are increasing their investment in science. Singapore recently announced it was doubling its national biomedical research budget, and has taken explicit aim at hiring U.S. scientists away.
The corridors of scientific institutions are rife with anecdotes of promising young researchers changing tracks and moving on to other careers. “She’s decided to go to law school!” is the common refrain, in semi-mock horror. But the downstream effects are no joke.
“You can lose a generation of researchers pretty fast—in five or ten years,” Joshua Boger, founder and chief executive of Vertex Pharmaceuticals and chairman of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, says in another report, also released earlier this year: “A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk.”
“You create such a discouraging atmosphere,” Boger says, “they just go somewhere else instead of academic research. We don’t have to lose 50,000 researchers, just 50 really good ones. Once it happens, we won’t get those people back.”
And of course, just as it is homeowners who will ultimately pay the price for the housing bubble, it will be the everyday owners of bodies—each and every one of us and our children—who will pay the price of the NIH funding deflation. Take it from Nancy Andrews, Dean of the Duke University Medical School, in the Pipeline report:
“People who have diseases that five or ten years from now should be curable are going to have to wait a lot longer,” Andrews says. “The knowledge is there, and we have the people who know exactly what to do to study the things that turn into cures. But they don’t have the funding to do it.”
On Friday Congress promised up to $700 billion for Wall Street. The entire NIH budget is (and for years has been) less than $30 billion. As our intrepid legislators scatter for their home states, perhaps some janitorial broom-jockey, sweeping up the Capitol building’s marble floors, will find a scattered two or three billion dollars on the floor and send it on to Bethesda, to buy the American people, and the world, a healthier future.
Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.
Comments on this article
This is brilliant, thank you!
Because of the public opinion polls we commission at Research!America, we know that Americans want the National Institutes of Health to receive more funding. In a recent survey, 45% said investment in NIH should be increased (see the finding from our Your Candidates-Your Health survey).
Americans are also willing to pay more in taxes to fund medical research (57% said they would be willing to pay $1 per week more in our 2007 National Survey, available in our Poll Data Summary.
So, Americans want more research and are willing to pay for it. And we also know that investment in research can save money in the long run and has positive impacts on the economy. (We’ve collected examples of this positive impact in all 50 states in our Economic Impact by State tool.)
Thank you for taking this position and writing about the need to increase funding for the NIH.
October 6th, 2008 at 1:22 pmThis bailout is just one more example of the indivisible handjob stroking irresponsible CEOs and CFOs with billions so that they can run the American economy even further into the ground. So much for Keynesian economics. If the goal is to stimulate the economy, why not give the money directly to the American taxpayer? We’d do twice as much good for the economy by giving even half as much directly to the taxpayers. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush administration.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:31 pmThis is truly amazing that the National Institutes of Health has been flatlining for over four years…This in itself reflects the need for change. Medical research will effect society in the following areas, an increase of healthy citizens for a healthy workforce, a decrease in SSI claims, medical insurance claims will drop as more and more diseases are cured rather than just treating the symptoms.
October 8th, 2008 at 3:02 pmWe as a nation should be insisting that the funding for the N.I.H. be increased dramatically!!!!
I am a fervent supporter of more public sector support for research, but by focusing exclusively on NIH, you are missing the larger opportunity for medical innovation that is more pressing at this point in time: the need for new and better ways to deliver health care and promote health. For the vast majority of diseases, we need better ways of delivering old innovations and better ways of preventing disease, not ever evolving ways of curing it.
Let’s look at the issue in budgetary terms. The U.S. spends about 2.8 percent of its $2.4 trillion annual national health expenditures budget or about $67 billion on public health. That means NIH is getting nearly half of all money with CDC, AHRQ, WRAIR, all state and city public health departments, and private and non-profit efforts dividing the rest. The total would be even less if NIH hadn’t gotten a major $2 billion annual infusion from the war on bioterrorism, which many would argue has skewed research priorities in the infectious disease arena.
So by all means, let’s raise our voices for more money for public health and public research. But let’s simultaneously talk about priorities and competition for scarce resources within this embattled community, and priorities within NIH. Given the poor performance of the U.S. health care system, we cannot allow the debate to be hijacked by well-funded patient lobby groups who peddle the “diseases that would have been cured in the next five years if only we had more money for research” line. That may have worked in the late 1990s, but it doesn’t address the health care system’s present needs.
Moreover, anyone with even a passing familiarity of the research and development process that leads to discreet biomedical interventions as a way of curing disease knows that the translational process from NIH-funded basic science to validated targets to actual cures is far more complex, usually more time-consuming, and often fruitless endeavor than that guilt-inducing formulation — “I would have been cured if only the government spent more money on research” — would allow.
Please don’t take this to mean I am against more money for NIH. But they are just one agency out of many in our government that has been systematically starved for funds over the past decade.
The next president will get a chance to pick a new leader at NIH. He or she should open a public discussion about the agency’s priorities with its existing funds, and engage the entire public health community, of which it is only one part, in the discussion about where are the next great opportunities in health and health care innovation.
October 8th, 2008 at 3:22 pmI am a young scientist in the middle of this financial crisis. I can personally tell you that what you said is absolutely right. As postdocs we are already getting paid below minimum income (ie most of us are living below the poverty line! we joke sometimes about nbc having a special “PhDs forced to work long hours horrible pay: the truth about young investigators”); historically this has always been the case, but now its much worse because room is very limited and we have to constantly worry about loosing our salary because of funding. I know of many colleagues who are switching to industry, another country and/or changing job. Situation looks bleak; for some situation its worse that 80%.
One thing not mentioned was the media coverage for NIH funding crisis, which is close to none -> I was lucky to find this via Google. Your last couple of paragraphs nailed it -> deep inside I think most of us cares more about our body but some reason or another the media does not think it important enough to cover.
October 11th, 2008 at 1:40 pm