Flickr, University of California DavisOver-reliance on shrinking federal research budgets led to the closure last week (November 15) of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute (BBRI) in Watertown, Massachusetts, a move that not only ended 44 years of biomedical research but also highlighted the similar struggles of independent research institutes across the United States.
“The BBRI could be a bellwether,” Jonathan Chernoff, chief scientific officer of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia—recently bought by Temple University—told Nature. “The same thing may befall other institutes, even the larger ones.”
Researchers in private labs are free from the teaching responsibilities that can weigh down those working at universities or hospitals. But by the same token, independent institutes don’t have the revenue from tuition fees or the administrative infrastructure to generate funds from elsewhere, so they rely more heavily on money from National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants for individual investigators—making them vulnerable to the continued economic downturn.
In the case of the BBRI, the figures tell the story. In 2010, it received $10 million in NIH grants—more than 80 percent ...
