Harvard's president urges more spending for medical research
WASHINGTON --Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust told a Senate panel Tuesday that five straight years of virtually flat funding for the National Institutes of Health has deterred young researchers at premier academic research institutions and threatened work that could produce lifesaving advances.
The lack of adequate funding is "having a cascading impact that is slowing progress and threatening future research that could lead to cures or even ways to prevent disease," Faust told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, which she presented with a report produced by seven academic research institutions entitled: "A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk."
The report says the NIH is the major funding source of biomedical research, with 85 percent of its budget supporting scientists at universities and medical centers around the country who are pursuing research aimed at preventing and curing disease.
"Even as substantial advances appear within our grasp -- including breakthroughs in Alzheimer's disease, lung cancer and depression -- they are at risk of slipping away because the NIH is experiencing a dangerous slowdown in funding," said the report, which was co-authored by Harvard, Brown University, Duke University, The Ohio State University, Partners Healthcare, the University of California Los Angeles, and Vanderbilt University.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., the committee's chairman, has pushed for additional NIH funding.
"We have before us a chilling statement of where our current budget priorities for NIH will lead," said Kennedy. "If we lose the talents of a generation of young researchers, we put in peril not only medical progress, but America's leadership in life sciences, too."
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., complained that President Bush's proposed fiscal year 2009 budget requested $29.5 billion for NIH, the same amount as the previous year.
"I am on the side of cures," Mikulski said. "That's why I have fought for years to increase NIH's budget."
Faust recalled that between 1998 and 2003, with bipartisan support, NIH's budget was doubled to $27 billion. She called the increase a "transformative force for biomedical research" that spawned major advances.
"This support enabled the research community to harness powerful new tools and complete the Human Genome Project, placing the United States -- and the world -- at the crossroads of a biological science revolution," she said.
But NIH spending has slowed in recent years as Congress grapples with new budget pressures. NIH's purchasing power has dropped 13 percent since 2003, Faust said.
"Leading scientists with quality grant proposals are caught in a protracted grant review process that plays out often over years, not months," she said. "As a result, investigators are downsizing labs, slowing research and producing more conservative, less ambitious proposals more likely to secure funding." 