Some of the country's top biomedical researchers have been beating a path to Congress in an attempt to fend off deep cuts in research funds. Nobel Prize winner Roger D. Kornberg, for example, has been making the point that it was doubtful he could have done his groundbreaking work on the way DNA is copied in the current budgetary environment. "In the present climate especially, the funding decisions are ultraconservative," he told The Washington Post. "If the work that you propose to do isn't virtually certain of success, then it won't be funded." As a result, young scientists are steering away from research and big leaps promised in cancer, Alzheimer's and other diseases may never materialize.
- check out the UPI report on the protests