Why Fund Basic Research?
Basic Research: An Expensive Investment in the Future
Basic research is an investment in the future. Though expensive, its costs pale in comparison to the long-term costs of providing health care for the millions of people suffering from currently incurable diseases. Dedicating more money to basic research will one day allow health care providers to shift away from difficult medical treatments — such as radiation and chemotherapy, kidney transplants and dialysis machines, heart transplants and bypass surgery — to a focus on cures.
The ability of the Stowers Institute to discover genes and proteins that provide clues to the origin of diseases depends, in large measure, on the growth of the endowment and its ability to support new scientists and establish additional laboratories.
Biomedical research can open the way to something better. This
occurred with the polio vaccine, whose development depended on first understanding the cause
of the disease and the three types of poliovirus. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is another
example of what basic research can do to improve health care. Initially used only in research
laboratories to study chemicals in test tubes, it now provides detailed pictures of the
body’s interior. As a further example of the role of basic research, some experts in drug
development say that 95 percent* of all discoveries leading to new drugs are made
outside of the pharmaceutical industry, although most actual drugs are developed by
pharmaceutical companies.
* Dr. C. Thomas Caskey, president of the Merck Genome Research Institute, quoted in The New
York Times, “10 Drug Makers Join to Find Genetic Roots of Diseases,” April 15, 1999.
Our Scientists
The Stowers Institute is staking out a pioneering path for
itself within the field of biomedical research by bringing scientists from many disciplines
together to focus on biological questions and by working across genetic systems instead of
concentrating on single genes, cells or proteins. This, along with our commitment to develop
and use the latest in technology, will allow us to produce results on a scale, and at a
speed unimagined a few years ago.
Our scientists are free to undertake areas of research that are
more creative or more cutting-edge than that generally funded by the federal government.
Together, Stowers Institute scientists determine the lines of inquiry to be pursued, making
those determinations with unlimited intellectual freedom. Their research decisions are not
constrained by the need to promise certain outcomes in order to obtain funding, a common
problem in obtaining grants. Having our own endowment means that Stowers Institute scientists
can pursue a particular project before knowing whether it is promising enough to qualify for
outside financing.