The US Cares 22.3% Less About Cancer
If you’re reading this, and you’re male, your chance of developing cancer during your lifetime is 44%. If you’re female your odds are slightly better at a whopping 38%. For people planning to die of something other than a cancer, like a Viagra-induced heart attack in a retirement home, this news sucks. Cancer sucks.
The way to help millions of people live longer lives would be to fund the careers of people trying to develop better cancer treatments. That would make sense. That would be a proper allocation of resources towards a field of human discovery. But that’s not what the US Budget of 2013 had in mind.
In 2013, $29.2 billion was appropriated to the National Institute of Health. If that seems like a lot, it was actually 5% less than 2012 (due in part to the sequester). This is part of a larger trend– NIH funding has been decreasing every year since 2003, a nearly 22.3% decrease when adjusted for inflation (Middle-Eastern conflict takes precedent).
That funding was slashed should seem odd considering the NIH’s storied success. Since 1990, Americans have gained an additional year of life expectancy every six years, and its research supports nearly 402,000 jobs, among which there are over 135 Nobel Prize winning scientists. Additionally, at the forefront of life science research for the better part of a century, the US has reaped the benefits of high returns on investment that go hand in hand with biomedical research. For every $1 of NIH funding invested, an estimated $2.21 is generated in the local economy.
The Human Genome project is one example of what happens when a bunch of smart researchers are given the funding they need to the do the research they’re capable of– money available. From start to finish the US government invested $3.8 billion in the Human Genome Project. The direct and indirect effect of this investment has been put as high as $796 billion in economic output [1] (This estimate led to the “1 to 140” return used by Obama in support of the BRAIN initiative. More conservative guesses are closer to 1 to 60– still nothing to scoff at). Genomics is, in itself, an entire industry now. Completely disregarding the functional impacts of the Human Genome Project (on medicine, genomic tools, forensics, biotechnology, agriculture, and underlying scientific knowledge), the project contributed to the creation of a field which generates $3.7 billion per year in federal taxes and $2.3 billion in state and local taxes.
Subjecting NIH funding to the across-the-board budget cuts, as the US has done, is a self-harming tactic. It’s like Jamaica selling Bolt’s shoes to fund its Olympic basketball team.
What this means for students considering going into biomedical research: don’t go into biomedical research. Or if you do, only write thoroughly explored, “safe” grant proposals. With money being tight and approval rates at all-time low, researchers aren’t going long on high-risk high-reward research.
There’s another caveat to the point above. Don’t go into biomedical research if you’re intent on living in America. Do go into research if you can speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or Japanese– China and Japan are both doing great right now. China’s biomedical funding increased 313% between 2007 and 2012 alone; Asia-Oceania’s share of biomedical research has surged from 16.6% to 19.1% while the Americas faltered.
In the meantime, citizens of the United States may be unlucky enough to live through a period of extraordinary biomedical stagnation. Cancer, stroke, ALS– you name it, we can’t fund it. But there’s an upside: we’ll get to see the awesome scenery of Eastern Asia during trips to get cutting edge treatment.
[learn_more caption=”Learn More” state=”open”]When Scientists Give Up
Economic Impact of the Human Genome Project
Assessing U.S. International Competitiveness in Biomedical Research
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