PITY the poor National Institutes of Health. The agency has seen its budget more than double in the past six years, from a mere $13 billion in 1997 to an estimated $27 billion this year. I say estimated because Congress still hasn鈥檛 passed a budget for the current fiscal year, which began last October.
Have other federal agencies seen anything like that kind of growth? No way! Is more biomedical research being done by more people in more places than ever before? You betcha! And yet the NIH and its friends are sad. President Bush is proposing a meagre 1.8 per cent increase in the agency鈥檚 budget for 2004, and much of the extra money will go on research related to anti-terrorism 鈥� finding cures for dread diseases like Ebola in case that virus gets weaponised. Not fair!
But there was a sliver of hope for the agency in late January, a chance to convince the President that more money for the NIH would be good for the country. Bush agreed to visit the NIH campus on 3 February. Presidential visits are almost always a good sign for federal agencies. News reports from the visit usually reflect well on the agency, and that makes legislators smile and possibly cough up a few more bucks. But not this time. The President鈥檚 speech was flattering to NIH, but the news reports focused on the Columbia crash, and the science being done by NASA. Surely if anyone needs more money in these tragic times, it is NASA.
Advertisement
PERHAPS what the NIH needs is an old-fashioned plague to return to centre stage. Word comes from the Republic of Congo that Ebola is on the loose again. An environmental group claims that Ebola has wiped out a whole population of mountain gorillas 鈥� 140 of the rare animals. So far, no human deaths have been reported. A team from the World Health Organization is on the way to investigate. Ebola kills very few people compared to malaria, diarrhoea or any number of garden-variety diseases in the developing world. But an Ebola outbreak 鈥� even in non-human primates 鈥� never fails to raise the alarm. But perhaps the NIH will attend to it. While he was at the agency鈥檚 Bethesda campus earlier this month, the President gave a few more details about something he proposed in his State of the Union address called Project BioShield. The idea is to make safer and more effective treatments and vaccines against disease agents such as anthrax and plague bacteria, botulinum toxin and Ebola virus.
Now it鈥檚 an appealing idea that if you throw enough money at a problem, you can solve it. But President Nixon tried that 30 years ago with the war on cancer, and a few people still succumb to that disease. To his credit, President Bush seems to have learned the great lesson of the war on cancer: scientists may not have cured cancer, but they certainly learned a lot about the basic biology of the cell. Consider these comments from Bush鈥檚 NIH speech: 鈥淎s scientists work to defeat the weapons of bioterror, they will gain new insights into the workings of other diseases. This will also break new ground in the search for treatments and cures for other illnesses.鈥� Well, that鈥檚 the hope anyway. And remember, insights aren鈥檛 the same as cures.
快猫短视频s of course will be pleased to receive the money that accompanies Project BioShield. But there is a downside. When the comforting illusion that American citizens can be protected from all manner of biological agents shatters, either because terrorists attack or the natural course of events brings some new and dangerous pathogen to these shores, there will be a temptation to blame someone, and scientists and their well-funded labs make an inviting target.
