Historically the NIH budget has risen at a pace of nearly 8% per year (with periodic up and down cycles) since 1960 and doubled over a period of five years beginning in the late 1990s. The proposed 0% increase for next year represents a sharp down-cycle which will influence our institution.

A group of 20 individuals, including myself, recently convened in Washington to gain a better understanding of what we could expect for the coming budget and, importantly, what we might do. Among those attending were leaders of other academic medical centers, Association of American Medical Colleges representatives, and staff who lead the house and senate budget processes.

A key conclusion reached at this meeting was that our national message must be clear: if fundamental research produces discoveries that impact on management of disease (anti-TNF for example), we should not be building the expectation that a cure is the only measure of success. We agreed that the biomedical research community must refine its message and better manage public expectations.

On the local level, we are developing a general response plan in conversation with Department Chairs. This response will be driven by the content of the faculty-driven Aims, two elements of which are particularly important. First, that deferred maintenance of our physical plant must be addressed and thus our major building plan (e.g., the Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery) will proceed with its normal cadence and not be slowed or pared back. The current NIH state is, by the read of history, transient and should not influence long term planning. Second, resources already committed to department program development will need to be identified and possibly redirected by departments as one aspect of supporting, for example, investigators who have just missed an NIH/NSF pay line. One might therefore imagine a slowing of recruitment in order to free additional resources for bridge funding, again in keeping with the spirit of the Aims.

We must likewise do all we can to make ourselves more competitive. We will continue efforts to optimize our interface with the DOE-funded Argonne National Laboratory. We will continue strategic interdisciplinary planning in the neurosciences, stem cell biology and immunology and hope to similarly engage the Computation Institute when new leadership is in place. We will continue to invest in the RISC seed funding program that is overseen by the faculty Research Advisory Committee chaired by Dr. Julian Solway. I expect that the results of these efforts will help position us for success in applications for large-scale interdisciplinary funding.

Corollary with this, we will continue our efforts to build partnerships with others external to the organization that tap scientific strengths and new resources such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus, and we will work with Northwestern and UIC to find scientific ways to leverage the $25 million recently infused into the Chicago Biomedical Consortium. These are just a few examples; we will find others.

Finally, I would strongly encourage the entire faculty to refrain from allowing our frustration with the NIH situation to bleed into negative and harmful remarks to aspiring young scientists, whether they are undergraduate, medical or graduate students or residents and fellows. While economists might argue that the NIH situation is symptomatic of a marketplace balancing itself, I think we must anticipate, as history suggests to us, that this course will again right itself, and the future of biomedical science will be advanced by the outstanding individuals we train.

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Recent Awards and Grants Information for Biological Sciences Division Faculty

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Recent Awards and Grants Information for Biological Sciences Division Faculty

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Recent Awards and Grants Information for Biological Sciences Division Faculty

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