“We have a deficit and a war.” ... NIH loses 2 per cent of funding every year for 7 years ....

Too few funds to fight cancer in U.S. | By Robert Weiner and Patricia Berg | April 18, 2008

With more than 500,000 cancer deaths in the United States each year, the underlying buzz all around the just concluded San Diego meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, with 17,000 scientists from throughout the nation and the world, was, “Where is the federal government?"
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Despite fear of the torturous physical slide of cancer – people's No. 1 health fear – federal funds for research into early diagnosis, treatment and cures are plummeting. The National Institutes of Health has lost 2 percent of its budget to inflation in real dollars every year for the last seven years, a 14 percent decline, points out leukemia researcher Michael Sheard of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Ellen Sigal, chairwoman of Friends of Cancer Research in Arlington, Va., and the chair of a forum at AACR on alternative funding mechanisms, confirmed Sheard's numbers.

When we asked Sigal why there is the drop in federal funds, she responded, “We have a deficit and a war.” If funding potential disease cures is part of the price of Iraq, it is no wonder that 70 percent of Americans oppose the war and want its cost to end in the scheme of priorities. ...
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NCI now funds fewer than 10 percent of requested research projects, down from 25 percent a decade ago. President Clinton had doubled NIH's budget – explaining many of the amazing recent breakthroughs – but now, with the budget dropping, private organizations are desperately trying to pick up the pieces so that innovative science can continue. ...
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The bar is now impossibly high for many new discoveries. At NCI, researchers “must show real leads, not discovery,” says Barker. ...