URGENT-Your Help is Needed
Important Legislation Introduced Regarding NIH Funding
Our friends at the Digestive Disease National Coalition asked us to pass along this very important message regarding NIH funding.
We encourage all DDNC members to contact their 2 senators and ask them to sign onto this letter. Contact information for all senators can be found here
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
The deadline for senators to sign the letter is close of business on Thursday, June 3rd. All the details are contained below in the note from Senator Casey’s staff. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions.
Senator Casey is circulating this letter to the Appropriations Committee requesting $35 billion for the National Institutes of Health for Fiscal Year 2011, an 11.9% increase over FY 2010. The NIH is the world’s leading research institution and the single largest source of biomedical research funding in the world, but the NIH has been losing purchasing power over the last few years as its funding has not kept up with inflation. A recent article in CQ said:
The National Institutes of Health will face a “crunch” in fiscal 2011 when a two-year allotment of $10.4 billion in stimulus funding for research runs out, NIH director Francis Collins told House appropriators … at a hearing on the agency’s budget. “There is no question that if you measure what happens in terms of success rates — that is, what’s the chance that an investigator who sends a grant into NIH is going to actually get funded — that is going to be a tough number in FY ’11,” said Collins, making his first appearance as NIH director before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.
The agency has sought to cushion the impact of the drop in funding, he said. “Although I would not tell you we are going to be completely successful in reducing the consequences of this cliff, certainly some of the money funded by [the stimulus legislation] has been for one-time expenditures,” he told lawmakers. Examples include fast-tracked two-year projects such as the cancer genome atlas that will look at genetic changes involved in cancer, as well as construction grants to build up researchers’ physical plants or to complete needed renovations, he said. “But science is . . . not a 100-yard dash, it’s a marathon — and two-year cycles are really not the way that advances the curve,” Collins said. “So we are going to face a crunch in FY ’11.”
In the hearing on funding for the nation’s scientific research institution, House appropriators spent two hours exploring topics as varied as pancreatic cancer, children’s health and the success rate in completing cancer trials. But the ever-present scramble for money was a continuing theme. During the last 30 years or so, NIH grant applicants had a 25 to 30 percent chance of success at obtaining funding, but more recently that has dropped to 20 percent, Collins said. In fiscal 2011, Collins predicted, just 15 percent of grants would be funded as the spigot of money provided through the economic stimulus law (PL 111-5) shuts off.
NIH grants not only fund critical research: they also create jobs for researchers, lab assistants, and others. The NIH has estimated that the ARRA funds will create or retain 50,000 jobs, and Families USA estimates that every $1 of NIH funding results in more than $2 in additional business activity and economic output. Without sustained investment in the NIH, future generations of researchers will seek other work, instead of constantly competing for grants to fund their research.
To see how much funding your state gets from the NIH, please visit this site: http://report.nih.gov/award/trends/State_Congressional/StateOverview.cfm. You can also use this tool: http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm to look up grants in a portion of the state, by year, funded by the Recovery Act, etc.
If your Senator would like to sign on to this letter, please contact Sara Mabry in Senator Casey’s office at 202-224-6324 or sara_mabry@casey.senate.gov by 5pm on June 3, 2010.
