An Award-Winning Cancer Researcher Says U.S. Science Has Never Been More Imperiled
WASHINGTON -- Around 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 150 or so people gathered in an otherwise empty National Press Club in downtown D.C.
Hours earlier, in the room down the hall, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had drawn throngs of press during an appearance before the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Now, none remained. Instead, attendees still in their work attire sat around tables sipping wine and eating moderately moist chicken dinners, waiting to hear from the guest of the night, a doctor from the Boston Children's Hospital whom few in D.C. -- outside those walls -- knew of.
Dr. Frederick Alt, a 66-year-old Harvard professor of genetics, is responsible for some of the most consequential breakthroughs in cancer research. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the keynote speaker who preceded Alt onstage, described him as a "luminary in the constellation of cancer fighters."
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Funding for the National Institutes of Health, the main federal spigot for biomedical research like Alt's, has bipartisan support among lawmakers. In recent weeks, a number of high-profile conservatives have called for investments in the NIH to be dramatically increased, and for Congress not to fret about cutting spending elsewhere to pay for it. But most people expect that when appropriators fund the government this fall, biomedical research will remain under-addressed.
This, advocates say, would prove catastrophic. Already, the NIH's spending capacity has dropped more than 20 percent over the past decade as the budget lines have failed to keep up with inflation or been reduced by policies like sequestration. The success rates for applicants has sunk into the teens, and the average age of first-time grant recipients has risen to 43 years old. Had the landscape been this bad when he was first pursuing his studies, Alt said, the possibility of his breakthroughs would have been dramatically diminished.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/30/nih-cancer-research_n_7180894.html
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