Thursday, February 23, 2012

A Case for Federal Funding in Biomedical Research


For the current fiscal year, the US government is proposing a flat NIH budget. When one considers the rate of inflation and the ensuing devaluation of our nation's currency, tomorrow's dollar will not stretch as far as yesterday's. What does this mean for today's research scientist? It means having to sacrifice manpower and equipment needed for biomedical research. It means fewer funds to train future generations of scientists. It means less funds available to fully staff research labs. It means my PI might be able to afford the reagents for my experiment, but not validation. It means I might make a discovery, but I'll be too broke to attend the professional meeting where I can share the results of said experiment with the broader community where said work might have an actual impact.

While I am as irritated with Congress as the next American about our nation's fiscal irresponsibility in recent years, biomedical research is one area that we should be fostering, not relinquishing. Federally funded research pioneered the development of affordable sequencing technologies, aided in the completion of the human genome project, and spurred the identification of therapeutic drug targets for a plethora of human diseases. Outside of human genetics, federally funded research has been instrumental in providing an environment that fosters discoveries that have been essential for understanding the basis of diseases like cancer and diabetes. Computational biology research has helped model the spread of disease, solve the structure of things like the ebola virus, and simulate population expansions during the course of human history.

Some biomedical research is also funded by the private sector, and it should be, but that funding is market-driven and goes after solving diseases that affect the largest number of people and hence can provide the largest returns on the investment. Yet there are a great number of individually less common diseases that together still affect very large numbers of people, and the private sector will not provide the money or manpower to understand and treat those diseases. As someone who studies Crohn's Disease, a disease that affects 1 in 100,000 people, that number might not seem like a lot. But that's over a million Americans with a disease that is not yet fully understood, but where progress has been made and where there exists the potential for it to be solved.

If you believe that biomedical research is a worthy endeavor of the federal government, please sign this petition in order to convey to our Congress how off-base they are on this issue. I know it's a long shot, but I prefer in this case to say something rather than nothing. You can sign the petition here: http://wh.gov/81O

"No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect."
-Edward Teller, Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist, b. 1908

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