The Principal Investigator

Interview from Nature News with Anders Ekblom, head of science and integration at AstraZeneca.

A bit late with this post, but wanted to put this out there. President Obama put out his budget proposal for fiscal year 2013. In an age of austerity, biomedical research received a small bump in funding for the year. I am an extremely biased observer and I like  that research was somewhat protected from budget cuts

When President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus package this week in Denver, he guaranteed research and development a $21.5 billion piece of the pie.

In an editorial appearing today (2.20.09) in this week’s issue of the journal Science, former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Elias Zerhouni praises the stimulus, highlighting the importance of federal money toward science at a time when university endowments and donations are shrinking, and university hiring freezes are proving especially painful for young scientists.

After more than five years of flat-lined federal budgets for science, the $10 billion infusion into the NIH feels like a major victory for science. But, as Zerhouni warns in his editorial, the stimulus alone cannot sustain science in the United States.

“I have testified in Congress that for every billion dollar shortfall in the NIH base budget, an estimated 6,000 to 9,000 scientific jobs are lost, with an equal number of jobs lost in indirect support activities,” he writes. “With increased layoffs in industry, one has to be deeply concerned about the human research capacity of the United States across all sciences, a key determinant of our future competitiveness.”

Although the economic stimulus money pumped into research and development stops the bleeding for now, it is “only a partial answer,” Zerhouni writes. “It will not stave off the loss of talented scientists unless it is coupled with a longer term increase in the base budgets of the research agencies to avoid the detrimental and painful effects of a rise followed by a fall in budgets, as has been experienced by the NIH in recent years.”

Zerhouni proposes that by fiscal year 2012, “the base science budgets of relevant domestic agencies should be increased by $10 billion per year.” The goal, what with a ballooning federal deficit, will not be easily met.

“A nation’s most strategic resource is the strength of its scientific workforce,” he writes. “It is imperative that the entire scientific community coalesces around a quantifiable and shared rationale for rebalancing the base domestic federal research budget beyond the one-time stimulus package.”

Related links:

NIH stimulus to fund old grants (The Scientist, 2.19.09)

Recession Watch: Work for the greater good (Nature, 2.19.09)

The New Deal’s Lessons for Now (Wired, 2.18.09)

Obama steps up to the plate on science (The Principal Investigator, 9.05.08)