Biomedical scientists' concern about the future of funding of health science research prompted this volume's exploration of the financing of the entire health research enterprise and the complex reasons underlying these increasing concerns. The committee presents clear-cut recommendations for improving allocation policies to ensure a balanced distribution of resources that will allow the biomedical research community to build on exciting recent discoveries in many areas. Funding Health Sciences Research also provides the first-ever comprehensive reports on the 1980s policies that have affected the research landscape, including stabilization, downward negotiation, and extended grant duration.

Threatened by sharp cuts in state government support and stagnant federal research funding, US public research universities are becoming fragile ecosystems. By charting flows of research dollars through a leading public research university-the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)-this book illuminates how such schools work to cope with these funding threats and how the challenges and coping strategies affect organization and direction of research. Academic leaders, faculty, administrators, and students will learn how a complex academic health center manages its revenues, expenses, and diverse academic cultures. For the first time, they can begin to understand arcane mysteries of indirect cost recovery, sponsored funds, capital investment, endowments, debt, and researchers' salaries.

By gathering institutional details on funding and health research systems in a comparative perspective, Structure and Dynamics of Health Research and Public Funding offers, for the first time, a comprehensive and systematic view of the options and restrictions to which scientists, clinicians and administrators are subject when seeking to establish a productive health research enterprise. The Structure and Dynamics of Health Research and Public Funding provides the reader with a comparative institutional analysis of problems of application in health research. In assessing the cognitive, social and institutional structuring of health research, explanations for the origin and variation of problems are presented. The study extensively discusses the capacities of funding agencies to contribute to a higher practical diffusion of health research knowledge. It is thus addressed to all individuals and institutions who are involved in the promotion of, or are concerned with, the future of health research.

This Review sets out to propose a structure for the funding arrangements for the whole spectrum of health research, with the objective of obtaining the maximum benefit from research success and, where possible, eliminating duplication of effort. The Review found, however, that the UK is at risk of failing to reap the full economic, health and social benefits that the UK's public investment in health research should generate. There is no overarching UK health research strategy to ensure UK health priorities are considered through all types of research and there are two key gaps in the translation of health research: (i) translating ideas from basic and clinical research into the development of new products and approaches to treatment of disease and illness; (ii) implementing those new products and approaches into clinical practice.The Review also found that the wider funding arrangements for supporting translation of ideas from conception to practice could be more coherent or comprehensive and, where arrangements exist, they do not function well. The Review identified cultural, institutional and financial barriers to translating research into practice in the publicly funded research arena. But it also found that, in the private sector, the pharmaceuticals industry is facing increasing challenges in translating research into health and economic benefit. The Review has sought to make recommendations that will increase the translation of R&D into health and economic benefit for the UK, both in the public and private sectors. The Review recommends that the Government should seek to achieve better coordination of health research and more coherent funding arrangements to support translation by establishing an Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research (OSCHR).