Biomedical Research Enters the Steady State

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Abstract
Two and a half years ago, when I was still a private citizen working at the University of California, San Francisco, my colleagues, Mike Bishop and Marc Kirschner, and I offered advice to our new President in Science magazine.1 The first of our 11 recommendations was to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 15 percent per year, in order to double the NIH budget in five years and restore the success rate for grant applications to at least 30 percent. A year later, just after I had been called to Washington to work for that President as director of the NIH, I had to admit, in a speech to the American Society of Cell Biology, that “our proposal to double the budget by fiscal year 1998 is simply not realistic.”2 By then, I was already reconciled to a more modest goal: “to stay ahead of inflation [for] the next few years.” Now, little more than a year later, we are faced with a new Congress intent on a balanced national budget at all costs. As a result, I have been trying to stave off cuts in the NIH budget — some nearly as large as the increases we proposed not so long ago — that would reduce our buying power by about one third early in the next century.

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