While the recent deluge of stimulus money to fund science research is very welcome, the chief of the National Institutes of Health said on Monday, the devil is in the details—will the support continue?
“Science is not a 100-yard dash—it’s a marathon,” said Francis Collins during an address at Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago. Collins is the first sitting NIH chief director to speak at the annual meeting; his talk attracted several thousand of the more than 30,000 neuroscientists and others who have converged on McCormick Place this week.
There could not be a more important time to reinforce the importance of science than now, as the president and Congress begin the difficult debate over the next fiscal budget, Collins argued. Most experiments started now won’t be completed in the two years covered by the stimulus grants, he pointed out. They “are down payments on results in the future,” and “to take away the fuel midstream would not lead to good outcomes” for the research or the researchers, he said. “Science doesn’t resonate very well with feast-or-famine circumstances.”
[A much longer version of this post is on the Dana Foundation blog.]
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