[ NEWS - FEATURE ]
Why We
All Should Love the NIH and How We
Can Make It Better
ARTICLE BY GARY MICHELSON , M . D .
The National Institutes of Health ( NIH ) is the nation ’ s primary funder of academic medical research . Our taxpayer dollars fund the agency , and the returns have been nothing short of transformational .
For example , of the more than 350 drugs approved by the FDA for use in humans , each one was discovered or invented by academic centers with NIH funding . Just to provide a reference point for the economic return for this underlying research , one of these drugs , Eliquis , has yearly sales in excess of $ 16 billion .
Another project , the Human Genome Project , has been thoroughly analyzed and the return on this investment has been calculated to be 21,000 percent .
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