Endocrine Insider
March 19, 2008

On Tuesday, March 11, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing during which academic leaders, scientists, and patients alerted the committee to the findings in a new report titled A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of NIH Puts a Generation of Scientists at Risk. Released the same day, the report warns that if the current trend of funding for NIH continues, America could lose an entire generation of young, energetic, and promising researchers. The report was written by a group of seven prestigious concerned academic research institutions—Brown, Duke Medicine, Harvard University, The Ohio State University Medical Center, Partners Healthcare, UCLA, and Vanderbilt University.

The study points out that in 1999, 32 percent of research project grants were funded, whereas in 2007, only 24 percent received funding. For first submissions, the decrease is even more severe, from 29 percent funded in 1999 to only 12 percent in 2007. The committee heard from Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, that this difficulty in winning first-time funding is resulting in many young scientists leaving academia for careers in industry.

Members of the HELP Committee were sympathetic to the need to increase NIH funding and to ensure that NIH is in turn funding innovative research that will lead to breakthroughs and cures for disease.

A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of NIH Puts a Generation of Scientists at Risk features the true stories of exceptionally qualified young investigators who have experienced funding difficulties themselves or have witnessed difficulties encountered by their peers.

The full report and a related report released last year by a similar group of institutions may be accessed here: http://www.brokenpipeline.org/