Problems with Public Investment in Research
Lawrence Cranberg
To the Editor:Thomas Andreoli’s argument in the November–December issue that investment by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in research is cost-effective is merely an assertion that increasing life expectancy since 1960 is to be attributed to NIH-funded research. Yet Andreoli acknowledges that increasing life expectancy is a phenomenon of very long standing. How does one separate the secular trend from the role of the NIH?
According to the 1999 edition of the World Almanac, gains in life expectancy since 1900 have been as follows: 1900–20: 6.8 years; 1920–40: 8.8 years; 1940–60: 6.6 years; 1960–80: 4.0 years; 1980–2000: 3.6 years (estimated). Thus in the interval from 1960 to 2000, when the NIH budget was increasing steeply year by year, the improvement in life expectancy was diminishing, not rising.
It is impossible to infer from such numbers a clearly beneficial effect of NIH research on life expectancy. The steadily increasing support for NIH research evidently comes from other sources. What those may be I leave to the reader, along with the interpretation of the decline in the rate of increase of life expectancy shown in the figures above.
Andreoli’s sanguine expectations of NIH benefits are therefore unsupported by evidence. Also, they run afoul of the predictions of Terence Kealey, a British physician and biochemical researcher at Cambridge University. His 1996 book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, finds two of those laws to be the following: (1) the public and private funding of civil research and development displace each other, and (2) the public and private fund displacements are not equal: public funds displace more than they themselves provide.
Kealey’s views have survived some scorching criticism and are surely worth consideration by academics and public policy makers generally, for whom ever-increasing federal funding for scientific research is being taken for granted as national science policy.
Lawrence Cranberg
Consulting Physicist
Austin, Texas
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