A plea for Mr Obama and other world leaders: it’s time to support science

http://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2014/sep/12/time-to-support-science-mr-obama

Version 0 of 1.

If anyone had the notion that the 21st century would bring peace and prosperity to most of the world, a mere glance at the newspaper shatters that illusion on a daily basis. Horrific wars and conflicts, downed civilian aircrafts, beheadings and executions and the brutal kidnapping of hundreds of young girls dominate the news. Western democracies must make concerted attempts to intervene and prevent such terror. This is easier said than done, as many such attempts have ended with poor results leading to a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” philosophy.

However, in addition to man-made dangers lurking around the globe, infectious diseases remain rampant in the less developed world. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta (US), the outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa has infected a suspected number of over 3000 cases with more than 1500 suspected deaths.

Although I hope that treatments will be discovered that will help the African patients, it is with pride that I have read that two US physicians who were infected while courageously manning the front lines of this war on disease in Africa appear to be doing well in US hospitals. A third US physician, also infected, was admitted several days ago to my own medical center hospital here in Omaha, Nebraska, and news reports suggest that he may be improving.

There is no vaccine available for Ebola, and there are apparently very limited amounts of the experimental drug that was reportedly used for the other two US physicians. In any case, the Ebola outbreak coupled with the lack of vaccines and ability to treat the masses of infected patients with drugs highlights the concern that scientific and biomedical research is not being sufficiently supported.

In the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – which is the primary source of funding for biomedical researchers – has a budget of just over 30 billion dollars. For those of us in research, this eventually translates into a ~5-10% chance of having a grant proposal funded. This means that a reviewer who is given a stack of ten of these grants to review, knows that statistically, 0 to 1 of the 10 grants will be funded. It’s not hard to see why scientists are feeling the pinch.

But even for those who are fortunate enough to be funded through the NIH, in real terms, science budgets have been declining for many years. The average yearly budget of an NIH grant has not increased in the 11 years that I’ve run my own lab. Factoring in cost-of-living expenses for personnel salaries, student stipends, and the inflation and increasing cost of reagents, the actual buying power of today’s budget compared to the same budget ten years ago has decreased dramatically. Just this week, my lab asked for a quotation for Foetal Bovine Serum, a staple for growing cells in culture to do experiments. In a typical year we purchase 10–15 bottles of 500 ml all at once (from the same batch and lot number to ensure consistency in our studies). Last year, the bottles cost $93 each. This year the cost has increased to $195. It’s not difficult to envision the negative impact that this has on the science.

I therefore make an impassioned plea to Mr Obama and other world leaders: do not neglect science. Support basic research in all of the sciences. Support biomedical research. Do so now, so that just as smallpox, polio and diptheria have been nearly eliminated from the list of threatening diseases, Ebola, HIV, malaria and other parasitic diseases may join the ranks of unemployed pathogens.

Steve Caplan is a biomedical researcher with a lab working on endocytic protein trafficking. He is another Occam’s Typewriter regular and tweets as @caplansteve.