COMMENTARY
Scientists struggling amid growing 'support'
By Gene Sperling
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President Bush told cancer researchers gathered at the National Institutes of Health in January that we need to "make sure that our scientists are given the tools and encourage young kids to become scientists in the first place." Yet his administration's stingy NIH budgets over the past five years and its threat last week to veto the appropriations bill giving the NIH a small funding boost sound more like components of a Discourage Future Scientists Act.
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.
There is simply no policy that will inspire a new generation of scientists if current NIH funding trends are continued. The American Association for the Advancement of Science predicts that the percentage of NIH proposals receiving funds will be cut nearly in half by the end of 2007, compared with 2001 levels. The demoralization resulting from these cuts is already trickling down to our future scientists.
Consider three negative trends:
Established researchers, too, feel the squeeze. Those whose highly rated proposals might once have been approved are finding that rejections leave them without the funding and research necessary to prepare viable requests for the next application cycle.
This strategy of implicitly discouraging homegrown scientists could not be more illogical for our economic future, especially as more of the foreign-born scientists we have traditionally relied on are returning to their countries. As the United States increasingly competes to host research and development facilities — and often loses — raising NIH funding for university research could help foster the types of technology clusters that encourage companies to keep R&D plants on U.S. shores.
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.
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."
Gene Sperling is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and was national economic adviser from 1997 to 2001. He wrote this commentary for The Washington Post.
