Research funding keeps U.S. healthy and safe
tute at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, where she is a professor in many departments. One of her laboratory progeny is Dr. Rodney Samaco, whose work includes the genetic and neuronal origins of social behavior and disorders such as autism.
Here’s what’s key: The work of all has thrived with the aid of NIH grants.
The development of these scientific family lineages depends on consistent NIH funding over years and across White House administrations. It is a long view that should be apolitical and a national responsibility. A major decrease in funding for this kind of work can disrupt and possibly even break the mentoring chain that’s so critical to teaching and innovation in scientific research. And this is exactly the crisis we face: The administration’s budget proposes slashing NIH funding by 18.3 percent, which would bring the purchasing power of NIH funding to 2003 levels.
The consequences are not hard to predict. The magnitude of this reduction in NIH funding would, in many cases, bring important work to an abrupt halt. But more important, it would cut out a generation of investigators.
The budget problem is a matter of logistics. NIH funding is committed in grants that last three to five years to enable completion of ongoing work. That leaves only about 20 percent free to pay for new work. If there is a 20 percent reduction in funding, more than 90 percent of new grants that would have been funded will not be supported in 2018. With no new funding opportunities for years to come, many promising careers would be cut short and the number of new researchers coming out of the nation’s universities would be drastically reduced.
Private sources — universities or disease-oriented organizations — cannot match the NIH research budget, which in 2015 alone funded nearly $21 billion in grants. The power of the American taxpayer through the NIH is fundamental to encouraging the solutions to the diseases that threaten the nation and the world. Without NIH grants, productive scientists will be forced to close their labs and their graduate students will lose their chance to find the solutions to major health problems.
A healthy U.S. population is a critical part of our national defense. It requires the physicians and scientists who are supported by NIH to continue to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of novel approaches to the care of our nation. It is ironic that the only major increase in the budget proposed for 2018 was to the Department of Defense. Increasing the external defense of our country at the cost of decreasing support for our national health will not improve the future of the United States.