Dear Research Advocate, Partnering with the National Disease Research Interchange (NDRI), Research!America commissioned a survey released this week finding that not only do Americans strongly support organ and tissue donation for research, they believe it is important to encourage more people to donate for both medical and research purposes. Respondents admire those who donate for research as well as for transplant. We may be at an important inflection point with more research made possible because more people will donate. Speaking of surveys, the AAAS Annual Meeting last week was jam-packed with programs about how the public trusts (or mostly trusts) science and appreciates scientific...

Dear Research Advocate, The President released his proposed budget for FY21 earlier this week, kicking off the federal budget season. The President’s budget is a statement of priorities, even if it has no force of law (it’s the Congress that is charged in the Constitution with the ‘power of the purse’), and it rightly gets considerable attention. We think it’s deeply damaging for our nation that a higher priority isn’t being placed on science. Among the counterproductive proposals in the budget is a more than 7% cut to NIH and a double-digit cut to the CDC. Our colleague Jenny was quoted in Bloomberg Government as noting that, as underscored by the coronavirus outbreak, “the most important...

Dear Research Advocate, We were pleased to hear President Trump, in his State of the Union address (SOTU) earlier this week, highlight the importance of progress against health threats. Specifically he referenced mental health challenges, Alzheimer’s disease, kidney disease, HIV/AIDS, the opioid epidemic, childhood cancer, and the current coronavirus outbreak. What we didn’t hear, unfortunately, is that the President will grow federal funding for research. Nor did we hear him speak of plans to assure U.S. leadership in the global R&D arena, giving it the priority merited by its strategic significance. The President’s references during the SOTU to dramatically lowering prescription drug...