President Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law; now the Obama Administration is making a push to show ARRA's success to the public. As the New York Times reports:
Mr. Obama's appearance was part of an intensive effort by the White House to sell Americans on the virtues of the stimulus bill. This week, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., cabinet secretaries and other administration officials are fanning out to 35 communities across the country, where they are talking up the measure and announcing new programs, like the one unveiled by Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood on Wednesday to pay for 50 new projects.
Included among those programs was some $8.2 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health, the federal agency that funds much of the nation's medical research. The NIH, in turn, made stimulus grants to scientists at the School of Medicine and its peer institutions across the country.
The School of Medicine received approximately $86 million in grants from that process. That stimulus funding ensures that senior researchers can continue their work, and also prevents young scientists, whom we are counting on to advance medicine in the next generation, from abandoning their labs to find other types of work.
Shortly after the NIH began awarding stimulus grants, the School launched a Web portal to show how it is using those funds. If you haven't seen it, we encourage you to check the portal out. As you will see, the stimulus dollars have put a top-notch scientist to work, funded research to identify the cause of infants' lung disease, and funded the development of a simple test for organ rejection.
Some material in this post was drawn from materials written by Jonathan Rabinovitz.
