The proposed federal budget would see drastic cuts made to most of the agencies that fund science. The sheer magnitude of the cuts—including a 40 percent slashing of money going to the National Institutes of Health—would do severe harm to biomedical researchers and the industries that serve or rely on them. And, ultimately, that is likely to do harm to all of us.
In today's issue of Science, some researchers have attempted to put numbers on those indirect effects that fall within that "ultimately" category. They've identified which grants wouldn't have been funded had similar cuts been made earlier in this century and tracked the impact that likely had on drug patents. Their conclusion: Development of roughly half the newly approved drugs relied on work that was funded by a grant that would need to be cut.
From grants to drugs
It's uncertain whether the proposed budget cuts will go through. At the moment, Congress is looking to fund most science agencies at levels similar to their current budgets. Should cuts eventually happen, then it's also difficult to predict how they'll be spread among the more than 20 institutes that make up the NIH (a number that the administration also wants to see reduced via consolidation). So, the researchers make a big simplifying assumption: Every institute within the NIH will take a 40 percent hit to its budget.
From there, it actually becomes simple to identify the grants that would be dropped as a result of these budget cuts. That's because the NIH operates a system in which each grant submission gets a priority score after evaluation and discussion. Grants are then funded, starting from the top-scoring grant and proceeding down the list, until the budget is exhausted. In this case, one of the researchers had access to every priority score between 1980 and 2007. So, the team simply started with the same list but a 40 percent smaller budget, making it easy to identify the grants that were funded based on the actual budget, but wouldn't have been after a 40 percent cut.