Heart Assn. Urges Experts to Lobby Congress for Funds
Suggesting that U.S. research into the country’s No. 1 killer is being eclipsed by foreign science, the leaders of the American Heart Assn. on Monday exhorted tens of thousands of researchers, physicians and others to begin lobbying Congress for a dramatic increase in funding for cardiovascular disease research.
Fully 49% of the scientific abstracts submitted for the association’s annual scientific meeting came from researchers outside the United States--most notably from Japan and Germany. That is up from 37% just three years ago and 25% in 1983, association officials said on the opening day of the four-day meeting.
“It is time we recognize that we live in a democracy run by elected human beings--often very human human beings,” said Dr. Virgil Brown, the association’s president, urging the researchers to use campaign contributions and personal contacts with their representatives in Congress to influence how federal money gets spent.
Dr. Michael R. Rosen, a Columbia University researcher who served as chairman of the committee that reviewed submissions and prepared the scientific program for the meeting, referred grimly to the conference here, attended by some 27,000 scientists, clinicians and others, as “a reflection of stagnation and even reversal at home.”
Asked how he thought researchers would take to the suggestion that they involve themselves in lobbying, Rosen said, “Look at it this way: They’d better lobby or give up the right to complain.”
The heart association’s call to arms comes at a time of growing dissatisfaction within the biomedical research community over shifting priorities, tightened budgets and increasing competition for money. Some say the environment is creating a “lost generation” of young scientists unable to make a career or a living in research.
Federal funding for biomedical research increased steadily during the 1980s, but breakthroughs sped the pace of science and thousands of baby boomers entered the field. As a result, the number of research proposals worthy of federal funding now exceeds, by a widening margin, the ability of the National Institutes of Health to fund them.
According to Rosen, heart disease research has suffered disproportionately. The budget for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute has received budget increases at little more than half the average NIH rate. With conditions such as AIDS and aging getting bigger increases, there is only enough money to fund one in five of all approved heart-disease research grants.
Rosen, a professor of pharmacology and pediatrics at Columbia, called for an approximate doubling of the institute’s $1.2-billion budget. But he declined to suggest where the money might come from, saying only, “It should not come from internecine bickering between institutes at the NIH.”
Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States. More than one in four Americans suffer from some form of it. Much of it is believed to be preventable through lowering blood pressure, stopping smoking, reducing cholesterol levels in the blood and knowing the warning signs of disease.
In his opening address, Brown suggested that the federal research budget is less a product of rational analysis of needs than “a political document which has to do with . . . the number of visits by interested groups to Capitol Hill, the letters received . . . and, in some cases, the numbers of marchers in the streets and headlines provoked thereby.”
For that reason, Brown suggested that it will no longer work to state simply, as researchers have done in the past, that research is important to the educational system and national competitiveness. Those arguments sound self-serving and have become tired and ineffectual, he said.
“Do you know personally a member of your congressional delegation?” Brown asked. “How many have invited a congressman . . . to visit your institution? . . . When he or she considers the NIH budget, his conceptualization of research is likely to conjure up his visit to an actual laboratory, your laboratory and your hard work. . . .
“It is also very appropriate to write letters and to visit his office when you are in Washington,” Brown added. “Finally, if you find a senator or representative that you can support, participate in the democracy in a most meaningful way, with a campaign contribution. Even a small contribution makes a statement like no other.”
