This summer William Talman became president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, an organization that advocates the advancement of biological and biomedical research. He is a professor of neurology and neuroscience at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and a practicing physician at the university’s hospital and at the Iowa City Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center. During a recent meeting with reporters in Washington, D.C., Talman said he plans to promote increased funding for biomedical research during his one-year term as FASEB president. In July he sent a letter to Congress requesting that the 2011 budget of the National Institutes of Health be increased to $37 billion, about $6 billion more than its current level and $5 billion more than the Obama administration has proposed. Science News science writer intern Gwyneth Dickey, who attended the Washington meeting, reports excerpts from Talman’s comments.
It’s not easy being an advocate nowadays, but it’s natural for me to advocate for the biomedical sciences. In my 40 years as a physician, I’ve seen remarkable changes that have come about in clinical medicine as a result of basic biomedical scientific research. Clearly, the influence of mathematics, physics, chemistry, as well as biomedical sciences has remarkably impacted how we practice medicine and how we provide for our patients. For example, neuroimaging has made it possible for us to do testing on patients in ways that we couldn’t have dreamt of when I started in medicine — ways that are safe for the patient, exclude complications, reduce hospital stays and improve patients’ life expectancy and their health while they’re living.
We’ve already made huge inroads into improved medical practice as a result of biomedical scientific research, but more is needed. There’s no question that the opportunities are greater now for further discoveries than they’ve ever been before.