In academic medicine today, there is widespread opinion thatinvestigationalfunding,especiallythrough the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is harder to obtain than ever before in history. This is particularly true in basic and translational research, where a direct cost benefit to a commercial enterprise is tenuous, at best. At a time when unemployment is in the double digits, housing prices are stagnant and the cost of health insurance is the most contentious national policy issue in memory, it becomes conceptually difficult to justify government expenditure to examine NMDA receptor subtypes in neonatal piglets. In this era, even well-designed and highly scored research proposals simply go unfunded.
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