Primordial Groove

I was wondering if anyone knew what the total budget is for stem cell research?

I found this link that puts the gov budget at 250 million. wtf?

What strides could be made by researchers if the budget was 1 billion or 20 billion a year? Would it make that much of a difference?

I'm not sure how research works but it seems to me if the budget for anything jumps 400% or 4000%, it will be a positive thing. Any insight?

Corwin

I doubt that 250 million hits it, but there's a law of diminishing returns when it comes to research. This is one of the points that's been discussed in the nanotech advocacy community. There does come a point, especially with extremely new research, where throwing additional money at the problem does no additional good... where you just have multiple different groups researching the same basic concepts and coming up with the same answers, and not doing it any more quickly than just having one group doing the research.

That having been said, I doubt 250 million is anywhere near this point for stem cell research. 20 billion would probably be excessive, but 250 million is a joke. (But considering Shrub's bias against biosciences.... hardly a surprising one.)

theyeti

20 billion is nearly the size of the entire NIH budget. The budget recently finished a planned doubling by increasing by about 15% a year for a few years. Now it's only going up by a measly 2% next year thanks to Shrub. The FY2004 budget is planned to be about 27 billion IIRC.

250 million sounds fine to me given the circumstances. That's in the neighborhood of funding for AIDS or breast cancer research. (Though of course these diseases get funding from sources outside of the NIH.) It's not clear at this point that extra money will be useful. This is especially the case since the number of researchers with experience culturing stem cells is relatively few. Better to let some early results come in first and then determine whether increasing the funding will make a big difference. At that point there should be a much larger talent pool for which to throw money at if researchers find them useful. Remember that the NIH primarily funds grants applied for by scientists. The level of interest in the scientific community will be reflected in the number and quality of grant applications, and hence the amount of funding allocated. In general, I think that stem cells have been overhyped by the media, though of course they have excellent potential. Fact of the matter is, lots of things that you never hear about have excellent potential.

I would of course like to see the overall NIH budget get increased at the rate that it was in the late 90s. But given the size of the budget, I'd say stem cells are getting a fair shake.

theyeti

Wounded King

Of course allowing the NIH to fund the people who are actually working on promising stem cell research might be an even bigger boost. But lets just give the money to keep those mangy mouse feeder based cell lines going as long as possible so the government don't look completely incompetent.