I had the opportunity to hear
Dr. Jeremy Berg speak last Friday. Dr. Berg is the Director of NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences (
NIGMS).
The mission of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) is to support research that increases understanding of life processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. NIGMS-funded researchers seek to answer important scientific questions in fields such as cell biology, biophysics, genetics, developmental biology, pharmacology, physiology, biological chemistry, bioinformatics, computational biology, selected aspects of the behavioral sciences, and specific cross-cutting clinical areas that affect multiple organ systems.
He ended his talk with a pretty amazing statistic: NIGMS has funded the research of 73 Nobel laureates. Another great example of why federal funding of research matters.