Universities Concerned about Medical Research
Within Our Grasp—Or Slipping Away?
Washington University and seven other prestigious medical centers published "A Statement by A Group of Concerned Universities and Research Institutions” in 2007 to call attention to the “looming crisis of diminished resources and research” due to the “funding crisis” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Looming Crisis
After pointing out that many breakthroughs in medical research had been achieved in part because National NIH funding had doubled from 1998 to 2003, they decry the steady decline in NIH funding over the past five years. The funding crisis means that “eight of 10 grant applications now go unfunded, according to NIH figures,” the report said. As of 2008, only 8 percent grant applications approved for funding by the NIH are actually funded.
As a result, “scientists are being forced to downsize their laboratories and abandon some of their most innovative and promising work. These conditions may also be putting at risk a generation of young researchers,” the report said.
Tragically, this “comes at a time of escalating threats to human health. New diseases, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), arise unexpectedly. Pandemic influenza is a real possibility, and HIV continues to spread worldwide. Obesity is a problem of national and global proportions, and bioterrorism is more than a theoretical threat,” the report points out.
The report highlights some of the amazing progress that has been achieved recently and asks what will it take to:
- Prevent the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease?
- Effectively target cancer?
- Stop the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes?
- Heal a severed spinal cord?
- Fight emerging infectious diseases?
- Maintain the United States’ global leadership in biomedical science?
“The singular answer to these questions is a strong and vibrant program of basic research,” the report concludes.
See report
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