US President Barack Obama has shown us the money, again. A year after the stimulus package provided a windfall $10 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, the budget proposal for FY11 holds strong and somewhat steady for science and medical research. There are proposed increases nearly across the board and include a $1 billion boost (to $32.1 billion) in NIH funding.

Working backward from the apt observation by physicist Ernest Rutherford—“We haven’t the money, so we have to think”—we might ask: Are there pitfalls to these buckets of cash?

It can be difficult to imagine money as a bad thing. Indeed, many US scientists think of the late 1990s as “the glory days,” when the NIH budget doubled within 10 years, translating to a 15 percent increase every year. In our excitement, we trained more scientists, built more facilities, planned big projects. But the budget couldn’t double forever, leaving biomedical researchers with not enough money to support this expanded community, causing paylines to crash and good scientists to lose their labs.

The moral of the story is: Just because the money’s there, doesn’t mean you should spend it. Sure, this budget proposal adds $1 billion, but also recommends a declining level of NIH funding beyond FY11. Reader Mark Weber at research-based company Fermalogic, in a comment about the recent windfall for NIH from the stimulus package, provides this sage advice: “The biggest problem I see with NIH is surviving the ‘bad’ years when funding levels are low…one nonfunded year can destroy an entire career. Use this windfall to create an endowment that will carry the agency through bad years and give its scientists a sense of security.”

And if you’re going to spend it, do it on the right projects. For example, Obama’s budget includes more than $6 billion for the NIH to start 30 new cancer drug trials in 2011, and double the number of new compounds in clinical trials by 2016.

Yet as “Anonymous Reader” commented on The Scientist news blog:

Calling for a specific number of new novel drugs/compounds within a certain time frame is like saying we should schedule flights to distant galaxies in 5 years. It just ain’t gonna happen! [Drug discovery] should be left to private companies/entrepreneurs…This is just another way to siphon funding away from basic science to translational science. (Editor’s note: isn’t anonymity a drag on the scientific conversation?)

Indeed, we may already spend enough on clinical research—the top NIH-funded area in 2009 was clinical research, and the top funded investigators were carrying out applied research in the clinical realm. And Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag recently instructed science agencies to “empower their scientists to have ongoing contact with people who know what’s involved in making and using things, from cost and competitive factors to the many practical constraints and opportunities that can arise when turning ideas into reality.”

Translational research is certainly not trivial, nor lacking its own requirement for invention, but to mandate applied science from the upper echelons, at the expense of basic research, is not a healthy trend. As put by another Nobelist, Max Delbrück, in his “Principle of Limited Sloppiness,” researchers should be “sloppy enough so that unexpected things can happen, but not so sloppy that we can’t find out that it did.” While sloppiness does not equate with basic research, the two notions share a sensibility of the unexpected.

How about taking on more risk and increasing the percentage of grants funded, as noted by reader Maria Castro from UCLA and the Cedars Sinai Medical Center (also writing about the stimulus cash)? “The best way to spend the new influx of cash…is to increase the payline to at least 20 percent. The current payline of 10 percent will end up eroding substantially the science base of this country.”

Meanwhile, maybe it’s time we make our own budget. How far can we stretch $1 billion? You might be surprised—see A Penny Saved in this issue for bizarre ways biotech is cutting corners, saving millions per year. And let’s turn ‘round the Delbrück quote: We have the money, so we have to think. Now more than ever, wisdom from The Scientist crowd needs to be registered.

sgreene@the-scientist.com

If you look through basic research manuscript discussions, you will see that their conclusions frequently include a sentence of how their study may lead to development of novel treatments or cures to diseases. Every time a mouse is cured of a tumor, the news announces that the cure for cancer has been found. The primary author of the research is often on the newscast supporting the announcement; when in reality nothing has changed. When people hear this, they assume that maybe grandma's tumor or Alzheimer's can now be cured. Although I believe in the the importance of basic research, after all of the false hopes, I also believe that tax payers expect and deserve to get results for their investment. Therefore, I agree with the increased funding for translational research. It's time to actually provide evidence for all of the 'conclusions' researchers make.

Cancer research is but one area where the translational research to develop the treatments of a disease without having sufficient, clear, basic knowledge of its mechanism and process has produced very expensive but limited successes with many more failures. Without knowing how something works normally with a greater certainty, how can one know what the precise causes of its defects are, much less prevent or reverse those, to cure a disease? The zeal to find the "cures" for the complex diseases, without first gaining sufficient knowledge of how body works at the molecular level, was doomed from the beginning.

I hate to disagree with Ms. Greene, but I must about her comment that "isn?t anonymity a drag on the scientific conversation?" Currently we have a single blind system for reviewing papers and grants in science; consequently, anything I say can be used against me without my knowledge and without any recourse on my part. Most scientists disagree with reviewers but the power is in their hands not only because of their position, but because of their anonymity. Thus, anybody who believes that an anonymous reviewer may use something against them will remain anonymous when posting anything that might be considered inflammatory, against the system, or make the person appear to be a whiner.

I happen to agree with the anonymous poster that we spend too much money on translational trials. The record shows that 8-9 out of 10 of them fail, and the problem is making funders realize this is groupthink and not the "wisdom" of the crowd. Thus, I like the anonymity of comments on this website to provide dissenting opinions.

For the mathematically inclined, the 15% per year budget increase mentioned in paragraph three translates to a doubling in five years rather than ten. In any event, you won't see either of those rates of budget increase anytime soon again, so the thrust of the article to get more efficient is very timely!