Investing in Discovery: How NIH Funding Powers Scientific Progress and Economic Growth
February 25, 2025
National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding has been essential to Will Beavers’ research and career. Support from the NIH and the American Heart Association helped fund his PhD and postdoctoral research, while grants awarded to his mentors provided him with critical resources.
As he transitioned to an independent faculty role, NIH funding helped launch his lab and sustain his early research. He later secured additional federal funding to expand biomedical research in federally underfunded states and an additional major research award to continue his work through 2029. Below, he highlights how sustained investment in scientific research supports discoveries that improve lives.
Read Beavers' explanation of the importance of investing in discovery:
Everything I have accomplished in my career and the financial stability my family enjoys, I owe to the NIH and the taxpayers who happily fund the NIH. As a first-generation student, I did not grow up wealthy and could not afford to attend graduate school without the support of the NIH.
My research group is a basic science research group consisting of myself, one postdoctoral fellow, two PhD students, four undergraduate students, and one research associate. We investigate how lipids kill the bacterial pathogen, Staphylococcus aureus, the causative agent of staph infections. The discoveries we make will identify and validate pathways that can be targeted by future antibiotics. All of the research we do is funded by the NIH. Five months of my annual salary and benefits are paid by the NIH. The salary of every other person in my research group is supported by NIH funds.
Every person involved in the research enterprise will be affected by these cuts. Federal funding not only provides jobs to scientists but also to custodial staff, food service workers, maintenance staff, and anyone else who keeps research universities running. Pharmaceutical companies rely on the NIH-funded research of universities to make the discoveries that allow them to develop, market, and distribute cures for diseases. These are our family, friends, and neighbors who all work together to achieve the common goal of making the world a better place for our children and grandchildren.
The money the NIH sends to LSU is dispersed to my lab. It’s budgeted for specific experiments and for specific fiscal years, and we’re not allowed to save money for a rainy day. If there is disruption to the current funding that has been allocated to my group by an act of Congress, I can only pay my personnel for a few months before we must start thinking about making difficult decisions about who can stay and who loses their job. The personnel in my group have been working toward their goals of becoming independent scientists for upwards of a decade and a lapse in funding resulting in my inability to pay them can derail or permanently destroy their careers.
As a definition, basic science is not immediately profitable nor immediately translatable. This means that our discoveries will not result in a cure for these diseases in the next few years. However, without a full understanding of the causes and effects of these diseases, the dreams of future scientists will remain just that—dreams. Basic science creates a foundation of knowledge that allows us to create groundbreaking new therapies that today can only be called science fiction.
If developing cures for society’s most prominent diseases wasn’t already a good enough reason to support basic research, federally funded research is also a smart investment. The return on investment is greater than 30 percent. The NIH reported for fiscal year 2023, every $1 of NIH funding generated approximately $2.46 of economic activity. For reference, a good retirement account gets 7 to 10 percent return on investment, making federal research one of the strongest investments we can make for our future.
I can’t stress it enough—these cuts will be catastrophic for research and discovery. And it goes beyond the actual cuts: the threat of cuts alone causes chaos and leaves us unable to plan for the future, making tomorrow’s discoveries and new therapies less likely.
“ Without basic science research laying the groundwork, necessary cures will remain out of our reach, and the diseases we study now will continue to plague our children and grandchildren throughout their lifetimes. ”