Reports Tout Return on NIH's Investment

According to a new report from the advocacy group United for Medical Research, and authored by economist Everett Ehrilich, because of the National Institutes of Health's investments, "the cost of sequencing a genome has fallen from over $100 million at the beginning of the last decade to about $20,000 today," and further, it's predicted that "the sequencing business will grow by 20 percent a year and become a $1.7 billion industry by 2015." The Wall Street Journal adds that NIH's $3.8 billion investment in the Human Genome Project, "along with subsequent capital provided by the government and the private sector, generated a total return of roughly $49 billion in direct and indirect federal tax revenues over the last two decades or so," according to a separate report authored by the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute, with support from Life Technologies. Daily Scan's sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News has more on the Battelle report here.