NIH Budget Problems

Source of graph: AAAS Research and Development 2006.

In a Washington Post article about the challenges facing the next director of the National Institutes of Health, David Brown writes about the NIH Budget:

The NIH this fiscal year will spend just under $29.5 billion on basic and applied medical research. More than 80 percent of the funding takes the form of 50,000 grants to 325,000 scientists in the United States and a few overseas. About 10 percent supports research by 6,000 staff scientists, most working at the agency's campus and hospital in Bethesda.

In the past decade, the NIH's budget saw an unprecedented doubling, from $13 billion in 1998 to $27 billion in 2003. In the past five years, however, it has risen only slightly -- and, when adjusted for inflation, has declined.

Comment: Apparently the Bush administration decided that we could not have two wars and an increasing medical research budget, and chose to fail to increase and then cut the NIH budget. I suppose that more lives have been lost due to the invasion of Iraq (considering the lives of the Iraqis) than will be lost as a result of the shorting of medical research. But I am not sure! JAD