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The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) could spend $750 million over two years for repair and construction of laboratories at universities and other institutions under a bill planned to be introduced in the Senate soon.

The money is urgently needed at US biomedical institutions, some say, where ageing and overcrowded infrastructure has not kept up with the booming business of research. The Twenty-First Century Research Laboratories Act is being introduced by Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa).

The bill would authorize the NIH to spend $250 million and $500 million in 2000 and 2001, respectively, for repairing, renovating and building new research laboratories. It designates unspecified amounts in the following three years. It would be the first time in 30 years that a large pot of money at the NIH had been set aside for this purpose.

The bill would also authorize the agency to spend $100 million next year on major, shared instruments. This year, the NIH is spending $35 million.

Too close for comfort? Many US biomedical researchers have to work in crowded facilities. Credit: CORBIS /P. A. SOUDERS

According to a 1998 National Science Foundation biennial survey, two-thirds of 304 institutions reported inadequate space for biological sciences research. The same 304 institutions deferred $11.4 billion worth of construction and repairs work because of lack of money. The federal government paid 8 per cent of their construction costs.

“The infrastructure is just creaking,” says Sanford Miller, dean of the graduate school for biomedical sciences at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio.

The bill's co-sponsors span a broad political range, from liberal Ted Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) to conservative Jesse Helms (Republican, North Carolina). Harkin, who complains in a letter to colleagues of “woefully inadequate” infrastructure, has tried to craft the bill to avoid it becoming a magnet for politicians anxious to channel money to their home districts.

The funds would go into an existing infrastructure programme administered through the NIH's National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), and funded at $30 million this year. Money would be distributed on a competitive, peer-reviewed basis, and could cover up to half of an institution's costs.

The bill has drawn predictable support from the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Association of American Universities. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), which represents 56,000 bench scientists, is more wary. The group is supportive of the bill, its president wrote to Harkin last month, “so long as these funds do not come at the expense of programmes for investigator initiated research”.

But FASEB's position stops short of an attack on the bill, something that supporters view as a good sign. “Historically, FASEB has not had much enthusiasm for bricks and mortar,” says Michael Stephens, a lobbyist for the group. “But in the context of this large build-up [of the NIH budget] we clearly need to deal with bricks and mortar issues.”

Judith Vaitukaitis, director of NCRR, has fewer reservations, provided that the NIH keeps drawing the big increases it has been getting from Congress. “There's been no significant investment in the physical infrastructure for universities that do biomedical research since the 1960s,” she says. “[Investigators] can't do research in parking lots.”

The NIH already supports infrastructure through indirect costs, which are chanelled to institutions as a proportion of the grants awarded to investigators. Such costs comprise about one-third of $9 billion in grant money being awarded this year.

But university administrators argue that indirect-cost money cannot be relied on for construction work. It is paid retroactively, and institutions must therefore generate their own start-up money from university, private and state funds — not always an easy task.

Also, for smaller institutions, it is not always certain that they will win the grant money necessary to recoup indirect costs after the fact, making building projects risky in the eyes of governing boards. Even for bigger institutions, retroactive reimbursement “can work well in routine cases, but it's very hard with a new building or an extensive renovation,” says Geoff Grant, associate vice-president for research administration at Stanford University, California.

In an analysis conducted by the National Science Foundation for NCRR, the top 100 institutions receiving federal science funding reported that, for new construction and costly renovations, they received $1 back in indirect costs for every $3 they spent up front.

The Harkin bill is unlikely to go far as a standalone measure. But proponents hope it will raise the profile of the issue so that the spending committees that approve the NIH budget will adopt some or all of its measures. That is not an impossibility in an era of $2 billion budget boosts for the agency, says Stephens of FASEB.