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1st appeared 9 July 1998 NIH Funding Decisions Should be Subject to Public Input A recent report from a committee of the Institute of Medicine recommends that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) seek broader public input on how it allocates research grants. The NIH could improve upon how it spends its nearly $14 billion budget if the public had a voice in the process, the report stated. The NIH is the single largest funder of health research in the United States. UCSF's four schools consistently rank near or at the top in competition for federal research dollars from the NIH. In the 1997 fiscal year, the campus received 745 NIH awards totaling $211.2 million -- $1 million more than in 1996. The awards include research and training grants, contracts and fellowships. Citing pressure from advocacy groups and other members of the public on the NIH to spend more on certain health concerns, the report suggests that the agency create new public liaison offices in the office of the director and in all of its 21 research institutes to allow interested people to formally take part in the process. "By creating formal links to the general public, NIH can ensure that all have a voice in what gets funded, and that more people understand how such decisions get made," said committee chair Leon Rosenberg, professor, department of molecular biology and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. "Ultimately, this input will help NIH apply the knowledge it advances to the best use for society." The agency should continue to use its five major criteria -- public health needs, scientific quality of the research, potential for scientific progress, portfolio diversification along the broad and expanding frontiers of scientific knowledge, and support of the people, equipment, instrumentation, and facilities needed for research -- in a balanced way, the committee said, and should also increase public awareness of how they are implemented. The Institute of Medicine is a subset of the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization mandated by Congress to advise the federal government on technical and scientific matters. Links: |
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