Penny-wise, Progress-foolish
 
I get a lot of questions about the kind of biomedical research my husband does.   People want to know which disease he is working to “cure”, etc.   Well, the short answer is none, he is not working to cure a disease.  He is in “basic” research, which is not directly involved in curing disease.  His research is focused primarily on apoptosis (programmed cell death), and cell signaling.  The investigations his lab does, though, lead to greater understanding of how particular things in the body work, which allows other people in “translational” and “clinical” research to investigate cures and therapies.  A solid foundation of knowledge must be built before “cures” are even on the drawing board.
If that explanation of basic research isn’t clear, I’ll give an illustration. My husband likes to describe “basic” research as dropping a 1957 automobile into a paleolithic human setting. That’s where we are in understanding the human body. Our knowledge of how the human body works is actually still quite primitive and crude. Before we can fix it or cure what doesn’t work right, we need to understand every part, how they fit together, how it works, what it does, etc., and develop all the tools needed to understand (research technology). That takes generations of investment.
NIH funding for basic research then also sets the stage for translational and clinical research back as well, which is the sort of results that we can use in our everyday lives. So if we want to cure disease and create advances in healthcare, we must invest in basic research.  
For several years, there have been severe cuts in basic scientific research funding from NIH, specifically because of the costs of the Iraq War. I’ll be transparent and say that this is a very personal issue as well, because my husband is a NIH funded scientist at a not-for-profit research institute (his job is dependent on “soft money”, i.e, outside grant funding) and NIH cuts directly affect the availability of funding for his research. If you stop hearing from me, it’s because grant funds ground to a halt, the internet service was cut, and we’re trying to figure out how to retrain a highly educated, highly effective scientist to flip burgers.  We’re hoping it doesn’t come to that, but I can tell you, there is a lot of morose humor like that going around in the scientific community right now. It’s really that worrisome, not just for our household income, but for the future of biomedical science in this country.
First, there was an across-the-board cut in NIH grant funding a few years ago and was specifically labeled as a cut, I mean reallocation to fund the Iraq war. Currently, NIH funding is at such critically low levels that really good scientists with proven track records (I’m not talking about “dead wood”, either) are leaving public research institutions to work for industry (especially Big Pharma) or other professions because they can no longer keep their labs going (trainee post-docs and graduate/undergraduate students). Fewer and fewer worthy grant applications are funded and the future funding looks equally as bleak.
 
This is *really critical* because without basic scientific research, no advances in disease and clinical research are possible. Yes, industry will take up some of the slack, but they actually do little of the basic, foundational research unless there is a potential commercial payoff (look up patented “disease genes” and the problems that is causing).  Scientists who have dedicated their lives and careers in the pursuit of knowledge are scrambling for what crumbs, I mean funds, are still available.
More importantly, and this is really significant, but not yet widely acknowledged, younger scientists are having serious problems getting “seed grant” funding and are leaving the profession and applying their talents elsewhere, never to come back, creating a severe break in the research pipeline and substantially depressing the future of biomedical scientific research in this country. This will have a huge negative impact on the future of innovation in healthcare for generations to come.
By the way, this isn’t “pork-barrel” spending, either. The amount of money to fund NIH research isn’t very much by government standards and it is one of the most efficient systems in the government. But 10% cuts from an already underfunded system is significant and there are additional non-monetary costs down the pipeline.
Is this a legacy we want to leave to our children and their children?  
 
Going Against the Grain
Tuesday, April 1, 2008