attracted engineers, mathematicians, cyberneticists, and other new colleagues to this clearly multidisciplinary effort to understand living things and their ailments. The Vicissitudes of Research Funding at NIFt The Genome Project was sustained during a fallow period of funding for NIH in the early and mid 1990s. Huge federal budget deficits in the early 1990s led to several years of depressing projections about the NIH budget, with minimal annual increases—less than consumer inflation. In contrast, the conclusion of the Genome Project coincided with a remarkable step-up in the funding for the NIH, the major health research agency of the federal government, as well as increases in R&D funding from the private sector. A concerted, broad appeal to Congress underscored the need to catch up and make bigger investments, given the scientific opportunities not just in genomics but also in imaging, neurosciences, and many other fields. Funding First, an advocacy arm of the Lasker Charitable Trusts, supported an analysis by prominent economists that attributed enormous net returns to investments in NIH research.6The result was a bipartisan commitment to double the NIH budget from SI3.6 billion to $27 billion between 1998 and 2003—a compounded annual rate of 14.4 percent—with a major component for bioterrorism-related research and development.7 During the same period, worldwide R&D expenditures by pharmaceutical and bioteclmology companies surged, with most of the increase taking place in the US, where expenditures from research-based members of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) alone increased from $21 billion to $34 billion. The new message was clear: In the face of popular demand for increased access to clinical services, across-the-board funding of innovation in science and
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDMwNDAx