In Support

Francis Collins appeared before Congress yesterday to advocate for the proposed fiscal year 2011 budget for the National Institutes of Health, notes Writedit at Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship. The 2011 budget proposed by President Barack Obama includes $32 billion for NIH and Collins says that those funds would help researchers conduct biomedical research. "Science is not a 100-yard dash. It is a marathon — a marathon run by a relay team that includes researchers, patients, industry experts, lawmakers, and the public," Collins said to the House subcommittee. Writedit adds that most of Collins' remarks "were of the fluffy, feel-good variety," but that he closed with some interesting points — namely that biomedical research helps power the US economy. Among the statistics Collins quoted were that, in 2007, an average NIH grant supported seven high-tech jobs, that "between 1982 and 2006, one-third of all drugs and nearly 60 percent of promising new molecular entities approved by the FDA cited either an NIH-funded publication or an NIH patent, and that research funded by NIH has led to gains in US life expectancy.