washington

US biomedical research is set to receive an unprecedented infusion of cash. President Bill Clinton and the Congress finally agreed last week to a budget for 1999 that will increase the funding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $2 billion, to $15.6 billion.

This 15 per cent increase is the amount requested for NIH last December by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), but which few of its members expected to attain. NIH institutes have been planning for months, however, in expectation of an increase greater than the 8 per cent that Clinton requested for the agency in February.

“We're elated over the NIH budget,” says Bill Brinkley, president of FASEB and vice-president of Baylor College of Medicine at Houston, Texas. The money “can be spent well,” he adds, predicting that NIH funding “is now on line for doubling in five years, from $13 billion to $27 billion”.

The budget includes increases of around 15 per cent for most NIH institutes and centres. Of the larger ones, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Center for Research Resources do best, with rises of 17 per cent and 22 per cent respectively.

The final agreement is even more generous than the highest NIH budget brought to the negotiating table, the one proposed by the Senate. An extra $40 million of research spending was released at the last minute, with $15 million of it going to the National Human Genome Research Institute, whose budget will grow by more than 20 per cent.

When Clinton first proposed an 8 per cent increase for NIH, the extra funding was supposed to be contingent on legislation to introduce new tobacco taxes (see Nature 391, 521–522; 1998). This legislation failed but, as expected, Clinton and the Congress managed to find a way to appropriate spending far in excess of the legally-binding budget caps they had agreed last year.

By designating $20 billion as “emergency spending”, the two sides were able to fund most of each others' priorities, while technically remaining inside the law.

Not every such priority was funded, however. Clinton's Climate Change Technology Initiative will develop more slowly than he had planned. This research programme is supposed to help the United States reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions, and has been opposed by the Congress on ideological grounds. Clinton requested an extra $450 million for the initiative in 1999. Although details remain sketchy, he is expected to obtain about half that.