A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk.

April 7, 2008

You can lose a generation of researchers pretty fast—in five or ten years. You create such a discouraging atmosphere they just go somewhere else instead of academic research. We don’t have to lose 50,000 researchers, just 50 really good ones. Once it happens, we won’t get those people back.

Joshua Boger, Ph.D.

Founder, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Chair, Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO)

“I don’t think one researcher’s funding plight means anything much in the scheme of things, but I think my difficult experience is being played out many times over. I hate to think of all the lost opportunities for scientific progress that are going unfunded, and the loss of economic competitiveness that will accrue if these funding trends continue.”

Anne Giersch, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Full Report: http://www.brokenpipeline.org/brokenpipeline.pdf