This week at lab meeting I led a ~15 minute presentation on the importance of the NIH – what it does, why it’s important for our lab and science in general, and how you can fight for supporting research.
What is the NIH?
The NIH is an institute within the US Government, within Health and Human Services. Overall the budget for the NIH is 50 billion dollars – a tiny tiny fraction of the overall US budget, but a major major funder for US research. The NIH has “in house” research and also gives out “extramural” grants to universities to do research. Just to put that budget in comparison, the American Cancer Society in 2024 gave out about $180 million in grants – so it would take >200 such societies to match the NIH. Moreover the NIH often funds basic research that wouldn’t be covered by something like a cancer society. Notably, for every one dollar put into the NIH for research, the payout to the economy is 2.5 dollars – emphasizing the importance of how research is good for the economy. The NIH has over 25 different institutes that cover a variety of diseases – infectious disease, cancer, the eye institute, aging, biotechnologies, general medicine, etc.
Why is the NIH in the news?
The current federal administration is attacking science, stopping or delaying grants from the NIH and other institutes such as the CDC and USDA, laying off mass federal workers at the NIH and beyond, and pushing legislation that will essentially end or majorly disrupt science in the US. NIH funding not only pays the salaries of researchers at nearly every university in the country, from UC Irvine to Harvard to Miami to Texas to Hawaii to Alabama, and beyond, but it also provides funding to schools via “indirect costs” that pay for basic necessities to run labs – for example administration of grants, running graduate programs, and even paying for electricity and water. The current administration has proposed gutting indirect costs and rolling them back by over 75%, which would cost universities like UCI tens of millions of dollars. The current administration has also stopped the rollout of grants and halted a variety of important programs that train young scientists.
How will attacks on the NIH affect research, biotechnologies, pharma and beyond?
Rollbacks in federal research funding will have dramatic and long-term negative effects on biomedical research. This will immediately impact academic research and small startups, but will also hurt large biomedical research groups who rely on basic research to generate new drugs and new ideas for therapies and clinical trials. This is a major sector of the US economy and damaging it will have ripple effects throughout many other industries, including healthcare. Hospitals will get more expensive, clinical trails will be harder to enroll in and fewer will exist, and fewer therapies will be approved to treat important diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and beyond.
What can you do?
If you’ve read this far, you’ve already done something amazing which is to learn more about the NIH and research funding, and how it affects labs like ours and the US research enterprise at large. Very few people understand what the NIH and other federal agencies are and how the promote research, so it’s our job to make this more clear. Be sure to disseminate your knowledge on research funding and it’s importance to your family and peers through social media and personal interactions. If you teach, be sure to include descriptions of how your research is funded. Importantly, be sure to call your local representatives to the US House and Senate and make your voice heard about supporting NIH funding. Even if you just write an email or leave a voice mail, and even if your rep already is pro-science, it’s important to make your voice heard.