How the NIH became the backbone of American medical research and a major driver of innovation and economic growth |
As a young medical student in 1975, I walked into a basement lab at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to interview for a summer job.
It turned out to be the start of a lifelong affiliation – first as a trainee, then as a grantee running a university laboratory and finally, now, as a researcher of economics and public policy studying the agency’s impact on health care and on the national economy.
On that initial visit 50 years ago, I got my first direct experience with the NIH’s mission: to tap the enormous potential of basic science to improve human health and medical care. And over the long arc of my career, I watched the agency enact this mission in ways that brought enormous value to the country. NIH funding trained a legion of biomedical scientists, produced countless therapies that underpin much of modern medicine and catalyzed the launch of the biotechnology industry.
But widespread federal grant terminations and disruptions to federal funding in 2025 have left scientists who depend on NIH support reeling. And a 40% cut to the NIH budget for 2026 proposed by the White House threatens the agency’s future.
The NIH was founded through the Ransdell Act of 1930, which converted the former Hygienic Laboratory of the Marine Hospital Services into the seeds of a new government institution. That laboratory had been established in 1887 to develop public health measures, diagnostics and vaccines for controlling diseases prevalent in the U.S. at the time, such as cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, plague and diphtheria. With the act’s passage, the Hygienic Laboratory was reimagined as the National Institute of Health.
Sen. Joseph Ransdell of Louisiana envisioned the NIH as an agency with a broader mandate for translating scientific advances to improve human health. In arguing in 1929 for the........