NIH budget goes down for 2007!

After a period of robust growth in which the budget of the National Institutes of Health [NIH] doubled from 1998 to 2003, the budget in 2007 is expected to be $28.6 billion, a 0.1 percent drop (3.8 percent in real terms) and the first actual decrease in the budget since 1970.

This is not without consequences for the Bay Area, which enjoyed more than $1 billion in NIH grants in 2004, with the largest single piece -- $438.8 million -- going to the University of California at San Francisco. UCSF was the fourth largest recipient of NIH funds. [UCSF is also re-starting its effort in SCNT, although the funding for this is from other than the NIH.]

"This downturn is more severe than any we have faced previously, since it comes on the heels of the doubling of the budget and threatens to erode the benefits of that investment," wrote Harvard Medical School Professor Joseph Loscalzo in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. "It takes many years for institutions to develop investigators skilled in modern research techniques and to build the costly, complicated infrastructure necessary for biomedical research. Rebuilding the investigator pool and the infrastructure after a downturn is expensive and time-consuming and weakens the benefits of prior funding." [Dan Levine, SF Business Times]