An unprecedented five consecutive years of stagnant funding for the National Institutes of Health is putting America at risk—slowing the pace of medical advances, risking the future health of Americans, discouraging our best and brightest researchers, and threatening America's global leadership in biomedical research. Unfortunately, President Bush's budget proposal recommends a sixth year of flat funding for the NIH in 2009.

On March 11, 2008, a group of seven concerned academic research institutions, released a new report—A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk—warning that America stands to lose a generation of young researchers and the cures they could discover if current NIH funding trends continue. The report features the voices of 12 junior researchers from institutions across the country who, despite their exceptional qualifications and noteworthy research, attest to the funding difficulties they and their peers are experiencing. Such difficulties, they say, are negatively impacting their work as well as science in general, and causing many young scientists to abandon academic research.

On March 19, 2007, a similar group of nine institutions released Within Our Grasp—Or Slipping Away? Assuring a New Era of Scientific and Medical Progress. That report details some of the tremendous medical advances being made in academic research laboratories across the country—advances that may be lost if NIH funding is not quickly restored to levels that overcome inflation.

You can lose a generation of researchers pretty fast—in five or ten years. You create such a discouraging atmosphere they just go somewhere else instead of academic research. We don't have to lose 50,000 researchers, just 50 really good ones. Once it happens, we won't get those people back.

Joshua Boger, Ph.D.
Founder, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Chair, Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO)

The risks [of continued flat funding of NIH] are that people who have diseases that five or ten years from now should be curable are going to have to wait a lot longer. The knowledge is there, and we have the people who know exactly what to do to study the things that turn into cures. But they don't have the funding to do it.

Nancy Andrews, M.D., Ph.D.
Dean, Duke University Medical School