Senate Multiplies Biomed Stimulus
The Senate is doubling down on the House proposal to support biomedical research and innovation with the recovery and reinvestment package—and then some. The Senate version of the stimulus bill originally provided $3.5 billion in funds for the National Institutes of Health (similar to the House version), but an amendment (SA 178), cosponsored by Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Tom Harkin (D-IA) and passed by voice vote, adds $6.5 billion, for a total of $10 billion, according to Bob Grant at The Scientist.
A boost this significant would go a long way towards stabilizing an agency that has seen flat funding for five years, and a concomitant 13 percent decrease in buying power as a result of inflation.
Hopefully, a new policy on that lifts restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research will follow passage of this stimulus. Increased NIH funding will give greater heft and meaning to the new stem cell policy. Indeed, some scientists have expressed skepticism about real change in the research environment if the policy shift opens up new stem cell lines to non-existent federal funding. Paul Basken reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription): “If Mr. Obama promises a policy reversal without finding significantly more money, ‘it will tend to ring hollow’,” according to Dr. Arnold R. Kriegstein of the University of California at San Francisco.
The article goes on:
A move by Mr. Obama might even bring scientists a counterproductive renewal of attention to the politics of stem cells. For all the attention Mr. Bush attracted with his 2001 order, stem-cell research has largely been redirected rather than blocked.
For more on the positive economic impact of NIH work and biomedical research in general see our recent post: “Data Bank: NIH Funding By the Numbers.”
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