The rats of NIMH

If ever someone were to write the book on how to screw up a highly successful country, the last six years will likely serve as chapter one. Granted, things aren't nearly as dismal as they seem since some events like 9-11 and Katrina were nominally out of our control until we were able to screw up the response. But most of our recent history has been characterized by a malevolent neglect of the things that worked in the past while simultaneously resurrecting many of our past failures.

The NIH funding disaster is just one example.

The NIH budget doubled from $8.9 billion in 1992 to $20.5 billion in 2001 and then grew to $27 billion by 2003. Adjusting for inflation, however, the NIH has not gotten even a penny increase over the past four years. The administration's fiscal 2008 budget would cut NIH funding by $250 million. The proposed budget in the House has only a small increase above inflation -- yet the veto threat puts even this modest gesture at risk.

And as far as science funding goes, the NIH budget is doing relatively well compared to other funding agencies. Though its not quite back to the bad old days of the Reagan years, the recent see-saw of NIH funding may stifle progress for 5 - 10 years after we get our acts together again.

Consider three negative trends:

· NIH freezes are causing fewer hires, lower salaries and increased layoffs among those who represent America's scientific future -- the 60,000 "postdocs" who seek lifelong careers in research. Such cutbacks don't just discourage PhD candidates; they send signals to college students that perhaps they should consider other career paths. As Hillarie Plessner, a fourth-year graduate student in immunology at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last year, "It's very scary and kind of sad. I don't know if I would've gone to graduate school if I had known it was going to be so hard to get funding when I got out."

· When the NIH cannot afford continued support even for proven research in areas such as Alzheimer's disease and asthma, less funding flows to the one- to five-year research project grants that are the agency's primary mechanism for supporting new ideas and helping faculty members start their careers. The average age for first-time NIH grant recipients has risen to 41.7 from 34.2 since 1970. "Our biggest concern," George Weiner, director of the University of Iowa's cancer center, told the Daily Iowan last year, "is that these people are going to give up on a research career."

· Many of the postdocs who are headed toward faculty positions fear that even if they get jobs, success is uncertain. Karyn Catalano, president of the Graduate Student Association at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, told the USC Daily Trojan last year that when they see professors struggle to maintain grants, "a lot of graduate students are really thinking twice about entering into the world of academia, because we know there is a very high potential of failure."

Things have a way of working through academia so that what's happening now will take years to mend. Beginning in 1998, the money started to flow and grants were funded. So people had to be trained (graduate school) to do the work. That takes time. And space. Today, almost 10 years after the initial increase, most biomedical research sites around the country have expanded their facilities to accomodate all these new people. But with the funding situation the way it is, many of those who had been trained or who would have been trained are leaving academic research.

Some may say the NIH has received enough already, now go forth and bring us those basic research results. But with a biomedical inflation rate being about 5% higher than the overall US inflation rate, even the well-funded NIH has already gone through a number of years of effective funding decreases. Consequently, many projects around the country just couldn't get done and Lord Marburger may have to wait a bit longer to get those results. Without a financial follow-through to maintain the advance of the budget doubling, it's difficult for the administration to continue to claim credit for the doubling--especially since it was approved before they took office.

Arguably NIH funding is more important to the health and well-being of our country than whether or not we adopt [FEAR]socialized[/FEAR] medicine. To put it in terms that even conservatives understand: industry needs government funded research to take the first step on the road to successful treatments. The risk to reward calculations just don't pan out for the vast majority of basic research currently persued by academia. Even though industry depends on the fruits of this research, industry can't and shouldn't bear the burden of funding both the basic pre-clinical as well as the translational and clinical research.

NIH grants are also a proven engine of entrepreneurship. One-quarter of those receiving funding from the NIH's National Cancer Institute between 1998 and 2003 have started their own businesses. A Harvard Business Review article last year applauded the NIH Roadmap -- launched in 2002 -- as a key effort to foster the "kind of research [that] translates basic scientific findings and concepts into specific product opportunities."

Shortchanging the NIH to compensate for the fiscal impact of tax cuts and rising defense and prescription-drug spending is penny-wise and pound-foolish. As Rockefeller University President Paul Nurse wrote in an editorial in the journal Cell in January 2006, NIH funding policies in recent years "are set to damage a whole generation of young research workers, and the negative impact on recruitment of the next generation of research scientists will be seen for years to come."

Certainly it's always possible that the voters of this country really don't want us to be leaders in innovation and entrepreneurship and therefore legislators in the House and the Administration are simply acting on those wishes. That would be the first paragraph of chapter two.