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<p align="right"><i>September 5, 2003</i></p>
<h3>NIH Research Under Scrutiny</h3>
<p>The House of Representatives came within a razor-thin margin of passing an 
  amendment that would have eliminated funding for five peer-reviewed National 
  Institutes of Health (NIH) grants during a July 10 floor debate of the Labor-HHS 
  appropriations bill (H.R. 2660). Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA), the amendment's lead 
  sponsor, cited the research grants as objectionable because they are &quot;much 
  less worthy of taxpayer funding than the kind of research the NIH is generally 
  doing to cure&#133; devastating diseases.&quot; The Toomey amendment, cosponsored 
  with Rep. Chris Chocola (R-IN), failed by only two votes (212-210). </p>
<p>The five research grants in question all involve subjects that relate to public 
  health, although the majority touched on sexual behavior including sexual risk-taking, 
  the health of transgender American Indians, HIV-AIDS and prostitution, sexual 
  dysfunction in older men, and the relationship between human population and 
  the environment in China. Rep. Toomey decried, &quot;Mr. Chairman, I ask my 
  colleagues, who thinks this stuff up? And, worse, who decides to actually fund 
  these sorts of things?&quot; </p>
<p>Rising to the defense of the nation's largest nondefense research agency was 
  Labor-HHS subcommittee chairman Rep. Ralph Regula (R-OH) who warned his colleagues 
  that defunding federal research &quot;would set a dangerous precedent and put 
  a chill on medical research if we start to micromanage individual NIH grants.&quot; 
</p>
<p>Rep. David Obey (D-WI), ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, was 
  decidedly more blunt in his criticism of the amendment. &quot;The day that we 
  politicize NIH research, the day we decide which grants are going to be approved 
  on the basis of a 10-minute horseback debate in the House of Representatives 
  with 434 of the 435 Members in this place who do not even know what the grant 
  is, that is the day we will ruin science research in this country. We have no 
  business making political judgments about those kinds of issues.&quot; </p>
<p>In fiscal year 2003, the NIH received $26.2 billion in federal funds making 
  it the second largest supporter of federal research after the Department of 
  Defense. Subcommittee chairman Regula noted that NIH manages a two-tiered peer-review 
  system that is mandated by the Public Health Service Act and receives over 120,000 
  research grant applications. Of the number of grant submissions vying for federal 
  funding, only 30 percent are awarded by the 27 distinct institutes and centers 
  that comprise the NIH campus created to support the nation's public health research 
  goal. Regula urged his colleagues &quot;to resist the temptation to select a 
  few grants for defunding because they do not like the sound of them based on 
  one paragraph.&quot; </p>
<p>Given the closeness of the roll call vote, the temptation was apparently difficult 
  to withstand. One Member said, &quot;I would suggest that there is a lot of 
  funding out there from people like Larry Flynt or others, but we should not 
  be asking the American taxpayer to fund this kind of thing.&quot; Obey countered 
  that he &quot;would rather trust the judgment of 10 doctors sitting around a 
  table than I would 10 politicians sitting around a table when we decide how 
  to allocate taxpayer money for those grants.&quot; &#149;&#149;&#149;</p>
<p></p>
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