NIH and Physical Sciences Budgets Take a Hit

Sledge hammer hits large mass resting on person.
From: UCB Physics Lecture Demonstrations.

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Budget blow to US science

Physics takes a hit despite earlier promises.

by Eric Hand

. . .

The spending bill marks the end of the annual budget wrangling in Congress (see Nature 449, 962; 2007). It includes spending for all government departments other than defence, which has already been approved. The final numbers for fiscal year 2008 include what amounts to a 0.5% increase for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), less than one-sixth of the rise that Congress had sought in an earlier, unsuccessful bill. Within the physical sciences, programmes in high-energy physics and fusion are hit particularly hard. "This is probably the worst budget for science that anyone can remember," says Michael Lubell, a spokesman at the American Physical Society in Washington DC. "It absolutely devastates and probably wipes out American high-energy physics."

Nature 451:2-3 (2007).

CERN - the European Organization for Nuclear Research