Collins calls the potential cuts a “profound and devastating blow” for medical research. | REUTERS NIH head: Medical research at risk

From his perch at the National Institutes of Health’s sprawling campus in Bethesda, Md., Director Francis Collins is eyeing the impending sequestration cuts warily.

If lawmakers don’t find a way to blunt the across-the-board cuts, the government’s premier medical research center will lose 6.4 percent of its budget — a cut Collins calls a “profound and devastating blow” for medical research at a time of unprecedented scientific discovery.


That means belt-tightening for NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, a drawback in the grants available for researchers across the country and ultimately, slower progress for treatments for cancer and other hot-button diseases, he says.

“There’s no sort of lever you can pull and all of a sudden, everything will be fine if you lose in one fell swoop 6.4 percent of your budget — which is what will happen on March 1 if nothing is done to prevent that,” Collins told POLITICO in an interview on Monday.

NIH is not alone in fretting over sequestration, of course. Virtually every domestic and national security function is facing across-the-board cuts if Congress doesn’t act, and agency heads throughout the federal government are trying to figure out where to cut.

But scientists had already been fretting about the growth of funding for their medical research.

NIH swallowed a 1.5 percent cut in 2011 after nearly a decade of incremental budget increases. Its funding has expanded at a slower pace since 2004 after surging from 1998 to 2003, when Congress nearly doubled the center’s budget.

At the same time, inflation has been eating away at the center’s buying power, Collins says.

“We have seen in the last 10 years basically an erosion of our buying power for medical research by about 20 percent, simply because the budget has been flat and inflation has been chewing away at that,” Collins said.

Collins is in his fourth year of leading NIH, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. The 6-foot, 4-inch 62-year-old steps with a brisk precision through the halls of the center’s original building, which was dedicated in 1940 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and now houses Collins’s office.

The NIH’s funding situation, he says, is a “strange paradox.”

“It is a wonderful experience to be a scientist in the middle of this right now because of the ability to ask really fundamental questions and be able to answer them,” Collins said. But he added that there’s a catch: massive government deficits that are threatening the center’s funding.

“The other side of the coin is there has, in most people’s memory, not been a time as stressful as this in terms of the support of biomedical research,” he said.

Collins insists that each of the individual centers and institutes will be looking for cutbacks if sequestration goes into effect.

One of the largest sums of funding goes to the National Cancer Institute, which operates on a budget of more than $5 billion. A high-priority project at the center right now is developing tests that not only screen for prostate cancer but can detect which cancer cells will metastasize and which ones won’t.

“Cancer is just exploding with potential,” Collins said. “We could go faster and faster; … it’s an incredibly exciting science, but it will go slower.”

Collins said he’s also worried about the availability of research grants. Although more than 80 percent of NIH funding goes to university and medical school researchers, only about one in six of those who apply actually receives a grant. The chances used to be one in three, Collins said.

“For people who are in the early stage of their career to just miss the pay line once, twice, three times is pretty demoralizing,” he said. “And they are getting demoralized.”

And Collins insists that apart from the health care benefits provided by medical research, there’s also a strong case to be made that it’s a boon to economic growth. With a majority of the NIH funding flowing across the country, cutbacks would mean losses of high-paying jobs.

“Purely on those grounds, this is a winner,” Collins said. “Of course, it’s more of a winner from the perspective of many of us who got into medical research for other reasons. Namely, we wanted to figure out how to prevent and cure terrible diseases.”