Cross posted from Nature’s The Great Beyond blog.
It’s budget-cutting season in the US Congress, and the word is that science will take a hit along with everyone else.
So a new study of the benefits of federal spending in biomedical research is particulary timely. The study undercuts the conventional wisdom that academics are bad at drug discovery — an old chestnut that has been revived of late by debate over the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s new venture, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.