During this time of federal budget woes, it's refreshing to get at least a little good news on the topic. As reported by Nature's newsblog yesterday, a U.S. Senate subcommittee has recommended that the National Institutes of Health's budget be upped in 2014, from just over $29 billion to around $31 billion. Meredith Wadman writes:
...The increase would include $84 million new dollars for Alzheimer’s disease research at NIH’s National Institute on Aging and $40 million for the much-watched Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative announced by the White House in April.
The Senate panel would also quintuple, to $50 million, funding for the Cures Acceleration Network, an effort by NIH’s new translational medicine centre to speed bench discoveries to the bedside. And the bill would extend to other agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services a requirement that is now operative only at NIH: that researchers deposit their taxpayer-funded manuscripts in a publicly accessible database.
Though, as Wadman writes, these budget plans are "far from a done deal," the Senate's support for the agency is encouraging:
Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who chairs the full committee, made it clear at a press event yesterday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, that she plans to go to the mat for NIH, which under recent sequester cuts lost $1.55 billion of its original 2013 budget of $30.8 billion. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s transfer of $173 million in NIH 2013 funds to other agencies in the department added to the damage.
“We want to say ‘no’ to the slash and crash of reckless cuts to American biomedical research,” she declared against a backdrop of white-coated medical researchers who had gathered to emphasize the impact of sequestration on NIH-funded scientists.
Previously: NIH director on scaring young scientists with budget cuts: “If they go away, they won’t come back”, Sequestration hits the NIH – fewer new grants, smaller budgets,
NIH director polls Twitter for real-world responses to budget cutbacks, A federal push to further brain research and As budget sequester nears, a call for Congress to protect funding for scientific and medical research
