Spotlight

FY12 Spending Debate Comes to a Close

Congress completed, and the President signed into law, the FY12 appropriations bill. The $915 billion spending bill wraps up the remaining nine appropriations measures. The bill provides funding for programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the National
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Rep. Rush Holt’s (D-NJ) Editorial in Most Recent Science

Science 16 September 2011:
Vol. 333 no. 6049 p. 1549
DOI: 10.1126/science.1211494
EDITORIAL:

Dueling Visions for Science

Rush Holt
Rush Holt is the U.S. Representative for New Jersey's 12th Congressional District and has a doctoral degree in physics.

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Finding and Funding the Best Science: Peer Review at NIH - 7/22/09

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Dr. Keith Yamamoto
University of California, San Francisco

Each year Congress appropriates billions of dollars to fund the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Did you ever consider how the money is distributed? With a budget of roughly $30 billion per year, the decisions that most strongly influence allocation of NIH funds are made by peer review by groups of professional scientists who typically are themselves funded by NIH. Is peer review really the best way to fund biomedical research? Are there intrinsic problems that compromise it? Could changes in peer review improve the quality of research?

These and other issues are discussed by Dr. Keith R. Yamamoto, an active scientist who has been involved in NIH peer review for almost 25 years, most recently leading an overall evaluation that produced key changes in the process.