High up on the 10th floor of Penn's Biomedical Research Building, Chris Burd's lab is nestled among rows of expensive equipment and humming machines.
Just a block or so south of the Quadrangle, the lab feels miles away from the daily undergraduate grind. His lab needs hundreds of thousands of dollars and at least a couple Ph.D.s to run.
But every year, paying for labs like Burd's is getting tougher and tougher.
A professor in the Cell and Developmental Biology Department, Burd is almost entirely dependent on money from the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is a wing of the federal government that doles out money to medical researchers, like Burd and most of his colleagues in the medical school.
The NIH is a $28 billion-a-year enterprise, and it funds about $550 million of Penn's operating budget, according to Vice Provost for Research Steven Fluharty.
And President Bush wants to cut it back.
Bush's proposed budget for 2008 anticipates that NIH money will decrease by two percent, the White House announced Monday.
The amount of federal money allocated for scientific research has been shrinking for the past 10 years, as things apparently more worthy - the war in Iraq, for example - come along.
"It's a big worry," Fluharty said. "There is a limited amount of money and if you're fighting wars all over the planet, things like this suffer."
How can Penn researchers worry about a two percent decrease in a budget of billions? Burd, after all, spends his days studying yeast. His colleagues study things I know nothing about: toxoplasma, neural crest cells, zebrafish. The government surely has more relevant things to pay for.
"Every scientist who uses taxpayer dollars has some obligation to justify their work," Burd said. "How is this going to help the human condition?"
So how does Burd justify his work?
"My mom, my grandmother," he said. In his office last week, Burd pointed to the background on his Apple computer: a grinning child - his daughter, Maya.
That's because Burd's research on things I can barely comprehend may give us clues about the origins of Alzheimer's disease. As a parent and a son, Burd understands how important it is to contribute in any way he can to curing a disease that can destroy families.
Burd's colleagues who research zebrafish may one day understand exactly how human embryos develop. Toxoplasma is one of the leading causes of neurological birth defects. Studying neural crest cells can offer insight into congenital heart problems.
Treatments for every disease you can think of - heart disease, cancer, diabetes - can likely, in some way, be traced back to NIH dollars. Researchers at Penn may be asking esoteric questions, but the answers can save lives.
It may only be a two percent budget decrease for the next year. But that budget has been shrinking during the time that Bush has been in office. Burd - and hundreds of his colleagues in the Medical School - are finding it harder and harder to find the money to pay for their work.
"You can't believe the hoops you have to jump through," Burd said.
Burd said he feels like he is perpetually writing grant proposals, then renewals for those grants. Only about 10 percent of researchers that apply for NIH grants get them, sometimes only after multiple tries. When I spoke to Haig Kazazian, the chairman of Penn's Genetics Department, he dreamily recalled a time when 25 percent of proposals were funded.
Often, the pressure to find money is so great it distracts Burd from the research itself. And if the NIH loses an additional $511 million that Bush has proposed for 2008, that pressure will only grow.
"It costs me time" to apply for grants, said John Murray, a colleague of Burd's in the Cell and Developmental Biology Department; he's the one who studies toxoplasma. "That's time away from the lab. Time away from thinking."
That's time away from making potentially lifesaving discoveries. Perhaps paying to study yeast and toxoplasma seems trivial compared to the War on Terror, but these Penn researchers - and thousands of others across the country - are a long-term investment in our nation's health. That's something every taxpayer can afford.
Mara Gordon is a College junior from Washington, D.C. Her e-mail address is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears on Thursdays.
