© SAGE 78/ISTOCKPHOTO.COMBasic biomedical research is key to conquering communicable diseases, which can spread rapidly around the globe, and the noncommunicable conditions behind the premature deaths of an increasing number of people. Many scholars believe that there is a correlation between support for fundamental biomedical research and the improvement of health outcomes, even though knowledge gleaned from basic research usually takes several decades to be applied in the clinic.
Basic research has traditionally been funded in great part by public money. Both small, investigator-initiated studies and large collaborative scientific projects, such as the mapping of the human genome, would have not been possible without public financial support. Unfortunately, however, basic research in the life sciences is usually underfunded.
In the United States, National Institutes of Health funding for all biomedical research has remained relatively stagnant since 2003. And in some countries, basic biomedical research now receives less support than it did just a few years ago.
With limited national budgets, it has become increasingly important to extract maximum transformative value for every biomedical research dollar, and it is necessary to determine how best to incorporate the relative merits of basic biomedical science with its ...
