Who does Congress remember when it passes laws benefiting research? Caltech, Princeton, Johns Hopkins—you get the idea— but not Jackson Lab, not the Worcester Foundation, not the Medical Foundation of Buffalo. That’s how the independent labs see it. They feel uncelebrated, often overlooked not only by legislators but by foundation officials as well, and they’re fighting back. At the annual meeting of the Association of Independent Research Institutes in Buffalo, N.Y., earlier this month, AIRI leaders named lobbying in Washington as a top priority of the organizatior Two inequities that the association would like to change: While universities can declare the interest on loans to support research as an allowable expense, independent institutes cannot. And certain awards—including the Presidential Young Investigators Award and the Searle Scholars Program award—are given only to researchers at degree-granting bodies.
The grassroots effort among geneticists to promote international collaboration on the mapping of the human ...