The world is on the verge of a new golden age in biomedical research and disease treatment. Groundbreaking medical discoveries are revolutionizing medicine and ushering in an era of sharpened, personalized tools for treating human disease.

Historically, the U.S. has been the unquestionable leader in this charge, primarily due to an unparalleled system of public research funding administered by the National Institutes of Health. However, on March 16, the Trump administration released a budget proposal that contained unprecedented, crippling cuts to the NIH, the crown jewel of U.S. biomedical research. Under the Trump plan, the NIH budget would be cut by $5.8 billion, a budget decrease of nearly 20 percent. Within the scientific community, such a cut in an already historically difficult funding climate is hard to fathom.

Let’s put the proposed budget cuts in perspective. The last significant increase in the NIH budget occurred nearly 20 years ago in the late 1990s and received strong bipartisan support. As a result, NIH grant funding rates hovered around 30 percent — meaning nearly a third of submitted grants were funded. Innovative and bold ideas found fertile ground, and we saw a boom in biomedical research, which paid significant economic dividends and led to many of today’s innovative therapies.

However, in the ensuing years, the NIH budget essentially remained flat, failing to keep up with inflation and the pace of discovery. By the mid-2000s, funding rates began to plummet sharply and have now sunk to historic, all-time lows — below 10 percent for many NIH divisions. Morale within the scientific community, despite exciting advances on the horizon, has probably never been lower.

The negative ripple effect of low NIH funding is massive. It creates an environment in which innovative high-risk, high-reward ideas are shelved for less ambitious projects. Early-career scientists, unable to obtain funding, either leave the U.S. to pursue research elsewhere, or leave science altogether. This "brain drain" of young U.S. scientists has been recognized by the NIH, but budget constraints prevent a significant remedy to the problem.

Even researchers with long track records of innovation are stymied by the need to constantly write grants just to scrape by. Ultimately, the cumulative effect of the current funding crisis is a drying up of the pipeline of ideas — potential cures are left on the table, an impact that will be felt in coming years. Meanwhile, emerging research powers like China and India recognize this opportunity to get ahead and are spending record percentages of their GDP on biomedical research. To say this is an unfortunate time for an NIH budget cut is an understatement.

Support of the NIH should not be a partisan issue. Even before the Trump budget proposal, politicians on both sides of the aisle recognized the current NIH funding crisis as one of fundamental importance to society. Newt Gingrich, a staunch conservative and Trump supporter, published a Fox News article in 2015 pleading for a doubling of the NIH budget. Gingrich made an excellent point — that we spend nearly $80 billion through Medicare in treating chronic kidney disease, yet the NIH is only able to devote roughly 0.8 percent of that amount toward developing a cure.

Similar financial discrepancies exist for many of the most debilitating human diseases. Imagine the long-term cost savings and reduction in human suffering if we could flip that paradigm and focus more resources on developing preventive interventions and cures.

We are on the verge of historic advances in biomedical research, and the powerful role of the NIH in pushing this effort forward cannot, realistically, be filled by any other entity — not private enterprise nor philanthropic groups. I plead with politicians and all Utahns to recognize that cutting the lifeblood of biomedical innovation will have far-reaching negative impacts on human health and the U.S. economy.

Joshua L. Andersen is an assistant professor of biochemistry at Brigham Young University. His views do not necessarily reflect those of BYU.