Posts tagged with ‘NIH’
Merril Goozner, a longtime Washington health and science gadfly who hosts the respected website gooznews.com, responded yesterday to my Monday posting about the negligent flat-funding of the National Institutes of Health. He makes the point that, bad as that policy has been, we should not forget that other important drivers of biomedical research and improved healthcare delivery have similarly suffered under recent Bush budgets.
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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.

The Department of Health and Human Services to propose a rule that would ostensibly protect healthcare workers who object to performing abortion and sterilization procedures. The catch is that there are already federal laws in place that do just that. The regulation would instead open the door to denying patients access to all sorts of potentially controversial health care services. The comment period closes tomorrow.
Since April, researchers publishing work done with NIH support must submit manuscripts for access in a free database. The experiment is working, but large journal publishers aren’t satisfied with the results.

At the beginning of the month, NIH pulled pooled GWAS data from its website and began encouraging other institutions to follow suit, because a team of scientists have figured out just how to identify a single person’s DNA from a sample of hundreds.

Art Caplan offered his “Six Easy Pieces” for improving medicine and life science in a recent column. But we’re not the only science publication looking forward to the possibilities of the next administration.
Americans know that the future fortunes of the country rest on scientific and technological advances, so Mr. President, let’s take biomedical science policy seriously.
This week’s Policy Forum in
Science addresses the “structural disequilibria” in biomedical research that has resulted from the recent funding history of the National Institutes of Health. Addressing these problems would create a more hospitable career path for young researchers and yeild more medical advances.
On Monday President Bush signed a supplemental appropriations bill granting $337.5 million in additional funding to various federal scientific agencies. The support is good news, but the administration should not have neglected the financial health of these vital groups in the first place.
This week, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute stepped in with $600 million in grant funding to 56 biomedical researchers pursuing high-risk, high-return work. The federal government should also fund researchers who “swing for the fences.”
President Bush’s latest request for Iraq war funding totals approximately $135.4 billion. What if we spent that money on domestic scientific research and development? Boosting R&D by the numbers.
The 2008 appropriations package included a provision requiring that any published articles emerging from research supported by the National Institutes of Health must be deposited in the PubMed Central database, where they will be available through open access, within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
After steady increases from 1998 to 2003 that doubled the budget for the National Institutes of Health, five years of stagnant funding have reduced purchasing power at the NIH by 13 percent, according to a report released yesterday by a consortium of research universities.

Is the NIH monitoring conflicts of interest?; EPA won’t explain itself on nixing state emissions caps; controversial framing of new MRSA study; new paths to energy-efficient electronics.

President Bush vetoed the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which would have increased funding for the National Institutes of Health from $29 billion to $30 billion and required open access to published NIH-funded research.

Family responsibilities are forcing many women to leave the upper ranks of life science research, according to a new survey of fellows at the National Institutes of Health.

The University of Michigan is hosting a conference on developing technology corridors this week as the Senate considers two major appropriations bills that fund science agencies.