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Actress Piper Laurie at last week's hearing. Credit: AP/JOE MARQUETE

Groups intent on securing increases in US research funding for particular diseases have recently intensified campaigns in Washington DC in the hope of substantially increasing their shares of the generous 1999 budget increase proposed for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Many have been using well-known personalities to present their case, and are countering warnings from the scientific community that such lobbying distorts research priorities with appeals both to scientific opportunity and to the economic incentives to target diseases that will affect increasingly large numbers of an ageing population.

The Alzheimer's Association, for example, wants an extra $100 million — a 28.6 per cent increase — in funding for the disease. This was the subject of a hearing convened by Senator Arlen Specter (Republican, Pennsylvania) last week which featured, among others, the actress Piper Laurie. Specter chairs the subcommittee that writes the bill that funds NIH.

Similarly, advocates for people with Parkinson's disease — including former heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, who suffers from the disease — made their case to the health and environment subcommittee of the House of Representatives Commerce Committee, which writes occasional bills setting the broad direction for NIH.

They insisted that doubling the funding for research into Parkinson's disease is essential for adequately exploiting research opportunities. They also argued that Congress is legally bound to produce the funds under a law passed last year calling for $100 million in new Parkinson's money over each of the next three years, as it had not provided the money (see Nature 389, 112; 1997).

The flurry of lobbying comes as Congress sets about drafting spending bills that promise to give the NIH an increase of at least 8.4 per cent, to $14.8 billion, and perhaps even more. It also comes on the heels of strong objections from NIH directors to congressional interference in research funding.

The directors told a panel convened by the Institute of Medicine last month that efforts by Congress to “earmark” funds for specific diseases “deform” science and, when permanent, are even “lethal” to the research enterprise (see Nature 392, 116; 1998).

Such pleas, however, do not always prevail with politicians who may draw on personal experience of family or friends crippled by diseases. For instance, Paul Wellstone (Democrat, Minnesota), a leading backer of increased Parkinson's funding, saw both his parents suffer with the disease.

And Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, whose mother-in-law has diabetes, wrote a $150 million increase in spending on juvenile diabetes research into the balanced budget law last year (see Nature 388, 617; 1997).

Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, which funds about three-quarters of NIH Alzheimer's research, says the new money could “very definitely” be spent on first-rate science, and that the ageing of the US population presents a “time imperative” for accelerating the research. Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which plans to spend $28 million on Alzheimer's in 1999, says the field has “immense opportunity”.

But both men argue against the Alzheimer's Association's attempts to increase research spending by 28.6 per cent. (The budget that President Bill Clinton sent to the Congress in February would increase it by 7.4 per cent, to $375 million.)

Hodes says that “scientific planning and scientific resource setting”, not Congress, should determine how the NIH spends its money. And Hyman argues that if Congress were to allocate an extra $100 million for Alzheimer's without increasing the entire NIH budget by the same amount, it would force the NIH to raid accounts for other diseases, and “might actually draw money from better to less worthy science”.

But in a country where 14 million people are expected to succumb to Alzheimer's when the baby boomers reach 65, politicians are hard pressed to resist calls to target a costly disease. At last week's hearing, Specter said the Alzheimer's Association's goal of $100 million in new funding this year is “laudable”. And Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa), the senior Democrat on the subcommittee, urged advocates to put “maximum” pressure on Congress to vote for the increased Alzheimer's spending.

At the House of Representatives, the reaction from John Porter (Republican, Illinois), the chairman of the subcommittee that funds the NIH, was less encouraging. Porter said that, where the NIH was concerned, political judgement was no substitute for scientific judgement.