On the surface, doubling research funding would seem to be a good thing. Advocates cheered the doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget between 1998 and 2003, with increases of almost 15% per year. I count myself among those who strongly support increases in funding for science, but it's become clear that the dramatic surge in NIH's budget has hurt, not helped, US life scientists.
Here's why: As the NIH budget doubled, the natural response was to train more scientists, expand existing labs, and build new ones. In the meantime, in 2003, as we all know, everything changed. The breakneck increase in funding came to a screeching halt, and inflation has caused the effective budget to fall every year since then. As a result, the number of NIH grant applications in 2007 is projected to be more than double the number in ...
