Congress’ decision to decrease the maximum amount that university and medical researchers can be paid from National Institutes of Health grants may eventually limit the research advances from Weill Cornell Medical College. Administrators at WCMC fear that decreased funding allocated to research may push medical college scientists out of their labs. Congress limited the total in NIH grants that individuals can receive by $20,000, forcing universities to cover this gap in researchers’ salaries. In order to make up for this funding cut, scientists may have to spend more time teaching and doing clinical work rather than research. Compensating for the lost grant funding could cost Cornell hundreds of thousands of dollars, but decreased attention to research could create a more serious pressure within a school that has long prided itself on medical discovery.

Over the course of the past century, WCMC has cemented its status as a leader in medical exploration and built a reputation on exemplary and noteworthy discoveries, much with the help of the NIH. WCMC’s General Clinical Research Center has been a fully funded NIH program for more than 50 years and has produced groundbreaking research on penicillin synthesis, diabetes control and gene therapy. Just this past year, WCMC research has ranged from post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans to the relationship between HIV and cancer.

Congress’ decision to decrease the salary caps of university researchers ignores all of the historic developments from the medical research community, while President Obama pushes his own appeal to the nation to recognize the importance of research to the United States’ future. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 24, the President linked research as a necessity for innovation. He singled out federally-financed labs and universities as a source of new treatments to combat disease, and implored Congress to not cut research grants from the budget, going so far as to call them “investments.” This endorsement of the continuing importance of research, especially at universities, becomes increasingly meaningful in the face of increased NIH grant limitations. 

By limiting grant pay for research, Congress is forcing many scientists to spend less time focused on areas in which they excel, which may have broad and negative implications for future research. While leading medical research institutions such as Cornell may have the ability to innovate and transform the world, they cannot do so without the full backing of the United States government.