ADA Research Funding in 2009: Where Will We Be?

This decade has been disheartening to diabetes scientists, not because their scientific discovery and progress has slackened, but precisely the opposite. Scientific journals are replete with new basic and clinical research findings that fire imaginations about a better world for diabetic patients in the near future. Funding the research has been the big problem. Funds that are so critical to our progress on the road to preventing and curing diabetes have been drastically constrained in the past several years by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Diabetes Association (ADA) because of budget shortfalls (wars and economic downturns are expensive). The tragic irony is all too clear. In a time of unparalleled accumulation of important new knowledge and fresh scientific insights into prevention and reversal of diabetes complications, the financial resources to take full advantage of recent leaps in knowledge have been hard to come …