Another Bush Legacy...Faith based money up while the NIH research Budget remains stagnant for years.

[tjwash]

Obviously this a deliberate move to shift researchers into the private sector.

The "stagnated" budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), now entering its 4th straight year of flat-funding, is creating a "looming crisis" that is forcing scientists to downsize labs and abandon innovative work, and alienating the next generation of young researchers, a panel of university officials and senior researchers told Congress yesterday (March 19).

"Promising research is now being slowed or halted," said Edward Miller, dean of Johns Hopkins Medicine. "We are seeing veteran scientists spending time not in labs but on the fundraising circuit. We are seeing young researchers quitting academic research in frustration, having concluded that their chances of having innovative research funded by NIH are slim to none," Miller told a Capitol Hill news conference yesterday.

The scientists released a report prepared by 20 leading researchers from a consortium of nine academic institutions and universities, that outlines the benefits of increased NIH funding on biomedical innovations, and warns of the negative implications should the present budget be left unaddressed. The report cited threats from unexpected new diseases, such as SARS and pandemic influenza, as well as obesity, HIV, and bioterrorism.

While Congress and the White House doubled NIH's budget from 1998 to 2003, funding has failed to keep pace with inflation. NIH's budget has hovered at around $28 billion, but once inflation is factored in, its purchasing power has fallen 13% over the past four years. According to the report, an average of eight out of ten NIH grant applications currently go unfunded, while at the National Cancer Institute, only 11 percent of grants are funded. "This is a recipe for disaster," Miller said. "The number of termination letters at Johns Hopkins is up three-fold."

Don't you just love America? Tom Brady gets paid millions per year for throwing a little leather ball around, while scientists need to scramble to find ways just to make ends meet and fund research.

Of course, if the U.S. Government cuts funding developments will be made elsewhere. Foreign students will continue get educated in U.S. universities, and then take that knowledge back to their countries where things such as stem cells research, alternative drug therapy and other areas deemed, "contrary to American interests" (IOW It costs big pharma too much). They will then sell the research back to the United States. It's a little concept that I have come to call "stealth outsourcing."

Foreign students are a significant part of the academic life of higher education. Their impact is noticeable in different ways at different levels of study and in different disciplines. Data from the "Almanac Issue 2001-02" of The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 1999, foreign students comprised 3.49% of all enrollment in higher education; 2.24% of undergraduate higher education, and 12.4% of graduate enrollment.

The same source data indicate that in the 1997-1998 academic year, foreign students represented 3.3% of all bachelor's degrees awarded; 12.15% of all master's degrees awarded; and 24.6% of all doctorates awarded. Among doctorates awarded in specific fields in 1999, foreign students were awarded 41.1% of doctorates in engineering; 33.9% in physical sciences; 26.2% in business, and 26% in life sciences.

During the 2000-2001 academic year,the top ten countries of origin for foreign-exchange students included: China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Indonesia, and Mexico.

I've been saying for years now, that forcing god in the classrooms of or public school system, and chipping away at legitimate science by trying to replace biology, evolution, physics, and medicine with faux-scientific concepts such as "Intelligent Design" was going to destroy the very fabric of our country. The very foundation of the United States being the worlds remaining superpower has always been based on "Yankee Ingenuity", and being on the cutting edge of science and technology.

That is slowly moving overseas as well. We are slowly graduating less scientists and doctors, while other countries are graduating more.

There were 475,169 foreign students enrolled in higher education in the United States in 2001 (figure 1a). This number was higher than the numbers in any of the other G8 countries, although as a percentage of all students in the country it is not among the highest (figure 1b). Foreign students comprised 4 percent of the total higher education enrollment in the United States. Among the G8 countries presented, the United Kingdom had the largest proportion of foreign students in postsecondary education programs in 2001 (11 percent), followed by Germany (10 percent), and France (7 percent). Countries with the smallest proportions of foreign students included Italy, Japan, and the Russian Federation (all 2 percent or less).

Figure 1a. Total foreign students enrolled in higher education programs from all reporting destinations, by country: 2001