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Good times ahead: NIH director Harold Varmus and Hillary Clinton applaud her husband. Credit: AP

President Bill Clinton this week promised record increases in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in a budget that delighted science advocates and confounded widespread expectations of tough times ahead for US researchers.

The Clinton administration is proposing increases of 8.4 per cent, or $1.15 billion, at NIH for the 1999 financial year, which begins on 1 October. An unprecedented 12 per cent increase would be made in research funding at the NSF, which supports most nonbiomedical research at US universities. Other agencies with strong basic research interests also fared well, as the administration dropped the emphasis on technology support that had characterized its previous five budgets.

Clinton had promised “the greatest increases in history” for NIH and NSF during his State of the Union address on 26 January, which was watched by a record television audience, largely because of recent accounts of his alleged marital infidelity. Harold Varmus, director of the NIH, was guest of honour at the address, and strategically seated next to the president's wife Hillary.

New projections published by the administration would increase the NIH budget by half to more than $20 billion by 2003. Other non-defence research programmes would also prosper thanks to a ‘21st Century Research Fund’, worth $171 billion over five years, announced by Clinton.

According to White House officials, the fund has no special legal status. But $25 billion is expected to come from new taxes on cigarettes which the Congress may enact as part of a ‘tobacco agreement’ later this year.

Announcing the science and technology budget proposal, Vice-President Al Gore described the five-year plan as “the largest commitment to key civilian research in the history of the United States”. He added that “more and more we find that science and society are interconnected”, and predicted that science would shortly cross “important crossroads”, including the complete sequencing of the human genome and the creation of “the first preventative cancer medicines”.

Varmus described the increase for the NIH as being “of historic proportions”. He added: “It is double what any president has ever asked for, and more than the Congress has ever appropriated.”

Neal Lane, director of the NSF, said that the increase at his agency “set the stage for a new century of progress in knowledge and discovery. It is a great time to be a scientist, and even a good time to be a science bureaucrat.”

The budget proposal would increase total basic research paid for by the government by 8 per cent, or $1.2 billion, to $17 billion, and applied research by 5 per cent, or $850 million, to $16.5 billion. Total federally funded research and development would grow by 3 per cent to $78 billion.

The emphasis on basic research echoes the views of leading Republicans in Congress, and contrasts with Clinton's previous emphasis on technology programmes. But Jack Gibbons, the president's science adviser, denies that the administration has been bounced by the Republicans into backing basic research. “We're delighted that there are calls for increased research and development from Capitol Hill,” Gibbons says. “It would be fruitless and unproductive to argue about who came first.”

The administration proposes to spend the money on research and other investment priorities, including education and the environment, without cutting other spending or consuming the $9.5 billion budget surplus projected for 1999. The budget avoids breaching the spending limits set in last year's balanced budget agreement by proposing that extra money should be diverted to research through a tobacco settlement.