'No Way to Run Health Research'

New York Times editorial (emphasis added).

The National Institutes of Health, the main supporter of biomedical research at universities and medical schools, has an annual budget of more than $29 billion. That is far above what any other nation spends on such research, and far higher than the budgets of other agencies that support work in other scientific fields.

Yet academic institutions are complaining that the N.I.H. cannot support all of the worthy research being proposed. They warn that young scientists with the potential for breakthrough work are being frozen out.

The academic leaders are likely right. The percentage of grant proposals that get financed has dropped from one in three early in the decade to one in four. The average age of investigators when they get their first N.I.H. grant has risen to 43, especially old for fields in which younger people often do the best work. . . .

Neither the government nor academia gave much thought to what might happen when the flush times came to an end, hastened by the huge costs of the Iraq war and tax cuts. . . .