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The Funding Pipeline: How Peer-Review Panels Parcel Out Disease Research Monies
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11456 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
4,085 Words |
| Author
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Kristine Napier
Kristine Napier, based in Mayfield Village, Ohio, writes on
health issues. |
Précis The huge strides in medicine that have come over the past six decades in the United States have been born of America's unique policy of letting scientists themselves decide where the government's disease-research dollars should go.
This policy is put into practice by assembling small working groups of scientists--known as peer-review panels--to objectively gauge the quality, timeliness, and importance of their colleagues' research.
The federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the principal biomedical research arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the world's largest organization supporting biomedical research. NIH is divided into seventeen institutes, each dedicated to basic research on the underlying cellular processes that allow infections, cancers, and other ailments to develop. Each institute focuses on research that will advance knowledge of and discover cures for a related set of health problems.
Once a peer-review panel ranks each research proposal submitted to it, its funding recommendations are sent to the institute's National Advisory Council, which is comprised of scientific and lay experts on the various diseases in the institute's portfolio. The advisory council, together with the institute director, decides on the size of the grants to be awarded.
In recent years, however, this process has been dangerously eroded by strong-arm lobbying and pork-barrel politics.
Ours is an era of medical magic.
Contemporary biomedical research has brought us angioplasty, joint replacement, organ transplants, and improved antibiotics; it is now moving ahead into genetic engineering and cancer treatments. Even Japan looks up to the American pharmaceutical industry, which has created new drugs and therapeutic strategies that have dramatically changed lives.
The foundation for America's medical magic, however, has been for nearly seventy years something entirely material and pragmatic: basic scientific research. During this period, government funding for this research has been allocated according to recommendations by bodies of professional scientists known as peer-review panels, but this system has been eroded in recent years by legislative manipulation and political lobbying.
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