Well, it looks like I'll be practicing medicine rather than pursuing science if this shit keeps up.

A House appropriations subcommittee today endorsed a flat budget of $28.3 billion next year for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The amount essentially matches President Bush's request for the agency and, if left unchanged by legislators, would mean the third straight year at that level.

Like President Bush's request, the House bill would give the NIH director's office a $140 million boost, mainly for biodefense countermeasures and the trans-NIH Roadmap. But it would cut most of NIH's 27 individual institutes and centers by about 0.5% to 0.8%. (One departure from the President's request is the elimination of a $100 million transfer from NIH to the Global AIDS fund.)

"No question, we're extremely disappointed," says Jon Retzlaff, director of legislative relations for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. "To now shut off the pipeline is not only going to hurt how quickly we can make strides, but also harm our entire biomedical enterprise" by discouraging young investigators from pursuing research careers, he says. NIH officials expect success rates for grant applications to sink to 19% in 2007, from more than 30% just 5 years ago.

Hear that fellas? That's the sucking sound of no one starting out in research anymore because it's going to be impossible for young investigators to get RO1 grants. The translation of the bolded statement is the paylines are going down, probably the worst since the Reagan years. I've actually met researchers, who when things were really bad under Reagan, fled the country to places like Canada and Australia because grants were just too hard to get. Yes, the funding is staying flat for the entire NIH, but that diversion to the worthless roadmap and bioterror means giant cuts in RO1 grants. Looking to the near future when I've got to look towards getting funding I've got to say, the easy road would just be the practice of medicine. Why suffer because these people don't value science. And this stupid fucking roadmap? No one wants it! We want what works, the time-tested RO1 funded grant (as Andrew Marks pointed out in JCI not so long ago - and responded to critics last week as well). Very discouraging. All this money wasted on bioterror, stupid fences, and a roadmap that's about as successful as the one the Israelis are using.