The Council provides a forum where institutions come together to identify common problems in the creation and maintenance of a thriving scientific community, to identify issues appropriate for institutional collaboration, and to develop strategies to strengthen the biomedical research policy environment in New York. Central to the Council's activities has been increasing New York's share of grants from federal source, most notably the National Institutes of Health.
HISTORY
The Council was established at The New York Academy of Medicine in 1995 to enhance the growth of New York’s biomedical research community and formed following a study of federal grant trends revealing that New York, long the preeminent state recipient of funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), had moved to third rank nationally. Leaders from the academic medical centers recognized the ramifications of declining NIH funds to an industry that is fueled by basic research. Over the prior 15 years, funding awarded by the NIH had grown from $2 billion to almost $8 billion. During this interval, New York lost $1.7 billion in potential NIH funding as its share dropped from 15.1% to less than 11%. And while other states had substantially increased their numbers of researchers over time, New York actually lost researchers.
In 1997 at the request of Dr. Barbara DeBuono, then Commissioner of Health, the Council convened the Ad Hoc Committee on Biomedical Research, comprised of twenty-seven leaders from the biomedical research community. The committee developed a report that reviewed the critical importance of a health biomedical research enterprise as a guarantor of quality health care for New York’s citizens and outlined a feasible and realistic strategy to reinvigorate New York’s academic medical enterprise. The committee concluded that the academic research institutions in New York State require and had the capacity to absorb some 300 new young research faculty over five years. Acting on behalf of the committee, the Council, in concert with the Associated Medical Schools of New York (AMS), produced “The New York Growth in Research Fund: A Proposal for a State Investment in a Healthy New York.”
Though many new researchers were recruited to New York academic institutions through the efforts of the Council and AMS over the past eight years, the distribution of these scientists has hardly been uniform and the rate of increase has not kept pace with other states such as Massachusetts or California. Throughout the State of New York, hundreds more are needed as bioscience emerges as a powerful economic driver of the next century.
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