Last night, NIH director Elias Zerhouni warmed up the geneticists with a sure-fire crowd-pleaser: a joke about the mishaps of Vice-President Dick Cheney, who’s in town for a Republican fund-raiser. Zerhouni apologized for the bad traffic yesterday, which was all tangled up due to Cheney’s motorcade. Zerhouni said he’d asked Cheney to divert his motorcade away from the convention center. In reply, Cheney invited Zerhouni on a hunting trip. “But I said no – I have a prior commitment to the American Society of Human Genetics,” Zerhouni said, adding after a small pause: “That was an act of self-preservation.”

After the giggles died down, however, it was all bad news. Zerhouni talked about the “apparent paradox” that even though NIH budgets doubled from 1998 to 2003, success rates – that is, the percent of grant applications that earn funding – are down. “There is a fundamental phenomenon at work here,” Zerhouni said: just as the doubling drew to a close, the NIH was deluged with a huge increase in grant applications. “The demand for grants took off just as the NIH budget was landing,” Zerhouni said, adding that genome czar Francis Collins prefers the word “crashing” to “landing” – “and he might be right,” Zerhouni said.

Zerhouni has faced a lot of critics, who claim he’s making decisions that are whittling away at the NIH’s budget for basic research. Last night, Zerhouni countered these claims with data. And he said that scientists must do a better job talking about NIH’s successes, so that the agency will get more money. He named some recent successes of genetic research as examples, such as finding the genes that cause most cases of age-related macular degeneration.

Zerhouni also said that scientists must sell the public and Congress on the idea that NIH is vital to help solve one problem that won’t go away otherwise: “Health care as we know it today is not sustainable. We have to move from a curative to a preemptive paradigm,” Zerhouni said.