'Looming crisis' from NIH budget

The "stagnated" budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), now entering its 4th straight year of flat-funding, is creating a "looming crisis" that is forcing scientists to downsize labs and abandon innovative work, and alienating the next generation of young researchers, a panel of university officials and senior researchers told Congress yesterday (March 19).

"Promising research is now being slowed or halted," said Edward Miller, dean of Johns Hopkins Medicine. "We are seeing veteran scientists spending time not in labs but on the fundraising circuit. We are seeing young researchers quitting academic research in frustration, having concluded that their chances of having innovative research funded by NIH are slim to none," Miller told a Capitol Hill news conference yesterday.

The scientists released a report prepared by 20 leading researchers from a consortium of nine academic institutions and universities, that outlines the benefits of increased NIH funding on biomedical innovations, and warns of the negative implications should the present budget be left unaddressed. The report cited threats from unexpected new diseases, such as SARS and pandemic influenza, as well as obesity, HIV, and bioterrorism.

While Congress and the White House doubled NIH's budget from 1998 to 2003, funding has failed to keep pace with inflation. NIH's budget has hovered at around $28 billion, but once inflation is factored in, its purchasing power has fallen 13% over the past four years. According to the report, an average of eight out of ten NIH grant applications currently go unfunded, while at the National Cancer Institute, only 11 percent of grants are funded. "This is a recipe for disaster," Miller said. "The number of termination letters at Johns Hopkins is up three-fold."

The report was released following a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services, and Education, during which NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni acknowledged the budget difficulties. "To support our vision and initiatives in the current budget environment we have made difficult but strategic decisions," Zerhouni said. These include holding the average cost for competing grants to Fiscal 2007 levels and not providing inflationary cost increases for non-competing grants. (Zerhouni also sharply diverged from Administration policy yesterday when questioned about expanding Federal funding for human embryonic stem cells beyond the currently authorized 21 cell lines, saying US scientists and citizens would benefit from access to more lines.)

Stephen M. Strittmatter, a professor of neurology and neurobiology at Yale University's School of Medicine, told legislators that his laboratory's discovery of the NogoReceptor molecule occurred during NIH's budget-doubling period when he and other researchers were more willing to take risks. Today, he said, "researchers shy away from real discoveries. They've become worriers, not explorers."

Robert Siliciano, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told the Senate panel the reduction in NIH grants has forced him to scale back on promising research into optimizing antiretroviral therapies. "Typically, in the past, I would spend about 30 percent of my time applying for grants; now about 60 percent of my time is spent preparing applications," he said.

Postdocs and even undergraduates are observing the frustration felt by many lab directors, said John Carethers, chief of the gastroenterology division at the University of California San Diego. "I try to be a face out there for young researchers, but they see worry lines on my face," Carethers told The Scientist, "If I falter, how are they going to continue?"

Ted Agres
mail@the-scientist.com

Links within this article

T. Agres, "Flat NIH funding again in '08", The Scientist, February 6, 2007
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/49077/

Edward Miller
'http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/governance/miller.html

Within Our Grasp - Or Slipping Away? Assuring a New Era of
Scientific and Medical Progress
http://hms.harvard.edu/public/news/nih_funding.pdf


ML Phillips and I. Ganguli, "Scientists react to US flu plan," The Scientist, November 23, 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22841

B. Trivedi, "Are we training too many scientists?" The Scientist, September 1, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/24540/

A. Harding, "US stem cell rules loosening?" The Scientist, May 20, 2004
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22189

Stephen Strittmatter
'http://www.med.yale.edu/bbs/faculty/str_st.html

"Nerve regeneration no longer a Nogo area," The Scientist, January 23, 2001.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/19409/

Robert Siliciano
http://biolchem.bs.jhmi.edu/bcmb/Faculty_person.asp?PersonID=591

John Carethers
http://cancer.ucsd.edu/summaries/jcarethers.asp