Stimulating Science: Funding for Research Included in Stimulus Package

In the hopes of fending of the current economic down turn, President Barack Obama signed in to law on February 17th the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), more commonly referred to as the “Stimulus Package”. Along with tax relief and investments in infrastructure, healthcare, and education, the law includes funding for scientific research. Within the $787 billion dollar package is $111B designated for infrastructure and science. While much of that will go toward rebuilding a national infrastructure that has been largely neglected since the Eisenhower administration, $10.4B is being provided directly to the National Institute of Health (NIH), the government bureaucracy largely responsible for administrating government support for biomedical research across the country.

The additional NIH funding was reportedly added to the bill at the behest of senator Alan Specter R-PA, as reported by Gardiner Harris in the February 13th edition of the New York Times. Specter, who as a ranking member of the Senate’s Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations sub-committee, and a cancer survivor, has long acted as a ardent supporter of the NIH. Specter’s vote was crucial as one of only 3 Republican senators, along with Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, who voted for the ARRA, this despite rigorous cajoling by the administration to garner bi-partisan support for the bill to lend legitimacy to the monumental legislation.

This renewed support of the sciences by the new administration is in line with the overtures the president has been making to the field in recent speeches. Notably during the inaugural address, Obama pledge to “restore science to its rightful place”. This was followed by his address to the joint session of Congress on Feb 24th where he proposed “seeking a cure for cancer in our time”. Now while such an ambition will be no less difficult to achieve and less easy to define than the moon shot challenge of JFK in 1961, it is good to once again see lofty goals being set by a government willing to support them.

This stands in dark contract to the policies of the Bush administration whose anti-science stances should not be news to any being with awareness greater than that of an insect. Although even that might not get you off the hook since there is a slime-mold eating beetle discovered by Dr. Quentin Wheeler named for the former executive, Agathidium Bushi. Whether it was stem-cell research or climate change, the previous 8 years were hardly a renaissance for science policy in the American government. While NIH funding has increased incrementally over that time from $17.8B in FY 2000 to $29B FY 2007 according to the institute’s website, this pales when compared to defense spending which reached $678B in the final year of the Bush administration as reported by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Of course, the question still remains as to what will the NIH spend the money on, and how will that affect those of us working in the field? According to a statement released by NIH director Raynard Kington, $8.2B will go to directly support scientific research priorities. Meanwhile, $1.8B will go toward shared instrumentation and capitol equipment, as well as construction and renovation of NIH funded centers. The remaining $400M will go toward Comparative Effectiveness Research; a much-touted program aimed at identifying best practices in the clinic with the hope of increasing the efficiency of treatments and alleviating some of the ballooning healthcare costs that are weighing down the U.S. economy. When this and the other money allocated in the stimulus package is spent, the public at large will be able to track the funded projects here, the website set up by the administration in the hope of keeping the process transparent and in the eye of public scrutiny.

What major achievements science will make as a result of this renewed investment into research by the American government are yet to be seen. However, there is an overwhelming in the scientific community that we have entered a new age of enlightenment and progress seems inevitable as impediments are lifted away. The sentiment is best expressed by the words of singer Nina Simone, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day”.

Joseph Negri is a graduate of Trinity College, and is currently involved in drug discovery research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He can be reached for comment at jnegri at broad.mit.edu