Dear Colleagues
Some of you may have signed this petition the first time it was posted. It
failed to reach the required quota of 25,000 by 446 signatures. The current
petition is open until April 17.
Please read the e-mail from Stephen Meltzer who started the petition.
If you had registered for the previous petition, signing the new petition
will take seconds. Just follow this link:
http://wh.gov/R3R
If you are not registered, registration takes less than 2 minutes.
Carol
From: Stephen Meltzer [mailto:smeltzer at jhmi.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 3:20 PM
To: NIH OER Communications Office
(NIH/OD);NIH_REGIONAL_SEMINAR at LIST.NIH.GOV<mailto:NIH_REGIONAL_SEMINAR at LIST.
NIH.GOV>
Subject: RE: Join NIH Experts in IN or DC for 2012 NIH Regional Seminars
I was on a recent conference call with Administration officials, during
which research funding was discussed. It seemed to me that these officials
did not fully understand the central importance of NIH funding to our
national research enterprise, to our local economies, to the retention and
careers of our most talented and well-educated people, to the survival of
our medical educational system, to our rapidly fading worldwide dominance in
biomedical research, to job creation and preservation, to national economic
viability, and to our national academic infrastructure. In response to a
question from a participant, they staunchly defended the proposed flat $30.7
billion FY 2013 NIH budget as being perfectly adequate, remarking that ³The
NIH receives more funding than any other research entity; it will continue
to be strong; it will do just fine.²
Unfortunately, this is not the case. The proposed flat NIH budget will
severely exacerbate a catastrophic crisis that has been ongoing since 2003,
when growth in NIH funding fell (and has continued to fall every subsequent
year) behind the rate of inflation. As a consequence of this deeply flawed
public policy, promising careers have been cut short, amazing research
projects have been aborted, hundreds of laboratories nationwide have shrunk
or been shut down, established and accomplished senior researchers have been
forced to abandon their programs, young scientists have departed from
research of even left the country (even after many years of productive
training), thousands of ancillary jobs have been lost, our worldwide medical
research dominance has been eroded (ceded to China, India, and other
nations), and a large support network of laboratory supply and biotechnology
companies has been drastically attenuated.
We successfully rescued the auto industry because we understood the
ramifications of letting it fail. Our biomedical research infrastructure is
just as far-reaching and vitally important to our nation¹s economy as is the
auto industry. I hope that our Administration understands this. For this
reason, we started a petition at the whitehouse.gov<http://whitehouse.gov
<http://whitehouse.gov/> > ³We The People² website on February 17, 2012.
However, our original petition to increase NIH funding expired on 3/18/12
(Sunday) at around 2 PM, with all supporters of this petition believing that
there were still 10 more hours left. At the time it expired and disappeared
from the We The People website, our petition was garnering approximately 4
signatures per minute, with only 446 of the 25,000 signatures remaining. I
estimate that it would have taken less than two hours to meet the
Œthreshold¹ per the stated rules. Many people helped with this effort,
especially towards the end. This outcome is indeed quite unfortunate and
also seems unfair, particularly since some browsers weren't allowing people
to sign, and the link to Help is still under construction.
We are still committed to pursue this cause, because it is simply too
important to give up on. The future of biomedical research is in trouble,
and this action may help at a critical time. Here is the link to our
petition:
http://wh.gov/R3R
Stephen J. Meltzer, M.D.
The Harry & Betty Myerberg/Thomas R. Hendrix Professor Departments of
Medicine (GI Division) and Oncology The Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine & Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center
1503 E. Jefferson Street, Room 112
Baltimore, MD 21287
smeltzer at jhmi.edu<mailto:smeltzer at jhmi.edu>
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