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(Circulation. 1995;91:2502.)
© 1995 American Heart Association, Inc.

Articles

Fighting the NIH Funding Crisis

Michael R. Rosen, MD; Suzanne Oparil, MD

	Introduction

 
On March 7, 1995, 26 members of the cardiovascular research community and five patients joined forces with the American Heart Association (AHA) and committed their time and their resources to travel to Washington, DC, to lobby. And it was a real commitment; they had to prepare, to volunteer their time, and to spend their own monies for travel and lodging. It is precisely this type of commitment that will be needed to counter—or at least limit—the application of severe cost-cutting strategies that have been proposed for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a whole and the NHLBI (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) and NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke) in particular. President Clinton's budget for 1996 proposes a 4.1% increment for NIH, with respective increments for NHLBI and NINDS of 3.1% and 3.0%, which are well below the biomedical inflation index of 4.3%. However, the mood of Congress is far more restrictive, with some of the members proposing cuts of as much as 10% (the president appears to be proposing cuts over a 5-year period that might end up being as severe).

The crisis in biomedical research funding has been growing for many years. Perhaps the most telling statistic in terms of its impact on the scientific community and on the performance of investigator-initiated science relates to the funding of new and competing RO-1 grants and New Investigator awards. For all of NIH, during the 5-year period after 1988, RO-1 funding decreased from 5170 to 4121, . . . [Full Text of this Article]