Flat funding for medical research at the National Institutes of Health could stall critical medical research and hurt research institutions like those in Baltimore, Sen. Barbara Mikulski said Tuesday.
“Cuts to NIH funding slow down our transition from science to treatment,” Mikulski said at a conference at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “We must continue to invest in biomedical research. We cannot turn backwards.”
She said President Bush?s fiscal 2009 budget calls for no funding increase for NIH, which received $29.5 billion in federal funds in fiscal 2008.
That will mean fewer advances in research and fewer scientists entering medicine, Mikulski and University of Maryland, Baltimore leaders said.
University researchers stressed the importance of NIH research funding in many of the discoveries made there.
One project that could shut down is the University of Maryland Center for Parkinson?s Disease, a research center that focuses on deep-brain stimulation, which involves inserting electrodes into the brain to disrupt the disabling brain signals of Parkinson?s.
“We very much have the ingredients here ? the talent, people, the work force and the ideas,” said E. Albert Reece, dean of the University of Maryland?s School of Medicine. “We don?t have the money.”
Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, has been leading the charge to increase NIH funding.
She spoke alongside Johns Hopkins Medicine CEO Dr. Edward D. Miller before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on March 11.
“I fear we may lose a generation of enthusiastic, inquisitive scientists if they conclude NIH grants are out of reach,” Miller said. “We must not let this happen.”
Their testimony coincided with the release of a report from Harvard titled “A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk.”
The report details what many scientists call a crisis in medical research funding.
