From the Rally: Invest in American innovation

Through the rhetorical din of the April 8 Rally for Research (see blog), a couple of statistics—shared by Rockefeller University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne—sounded like a tocsin: Annual health-care costs have climbed to reach more than US$8,600 per person over the past decade. But the government’s annual investments in the US National Institutes of Health have hovered at a paltry $100 per person—about 80 times less.  

“NIH funding has been flat for a decade and has lost 20 percent of its purchasing power due to inflation,” said Tessier-Lavigne. 

The first statistic was plucked from data compiled by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency gauges yearly increases and trends in health care spending, not just for the vulnerable or elderly populations that CMS serves but for the entire US population.  Its  report found that, in 2011, health care spending in the US reached an astounding $2.7 trillion—or about $8,680 per person. 

Meanwhile, less than 6 cents of every health dollar is spent on research, according to Research!America, an organizer of the rally, and barely more than a penny of every health dollar goes to the NIH. 

The dollars and sense message pounded home by Tessier-Lavigne and others who spoke at the Washington, D.C., event was simple: curtailing investments in basic science—one of the saddest consequences of the $85 billion in across-the-board federal spending cuts that kicked in March 1—could gut US innovation, especially the biomedical variety. 

In support of his argument, Tessier-Lavigne cited the arsenal of antiviral drugs that, over the past 15 years, has transformed AIDS into a chronic disease that is now manageable without hospitalization. “The great news is that we are in a golden age of research,” said Tessier-Lavigne. This, he said, has been largely made possible through the sequencing of the human genome and other technologies that would have languished without public support. 

“We now find ourselves at a time of huge medical need, but also enormous scientific opportunity—and yet, we are pulling back.” Tessier-Lavigne noted another subtle drawback to the cuts in funding: scientists are spending more time raising money than doing research.  

Others, he says, are leaving the US for greener pastures. 

“Most worrisome,” he said, “young people are getting discouraged from [picking scientific] research as a career.  If we continue on this path, we will kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”