Editorial

Abstract

Economic hardship brings with it an evitable ripple of difficulties, across a spectrum of areas. One of these is medical research. Here, in the USA, we have felt it as badly as anywhere else in the world. The problem has not decreased efforts towards new research projects and innovations, but has just made the funding pool that much smaller. So ridiculous figures are now being spoken of. Organisations like the National Institutes of Health have dropped funding for projects to anywhere between 2-5% of applications. That means that with regard to our major resource pool for research funding, the applicant has more than 95% odds of failure. It makes one wonder why research scientists have not thrown their arms up in despair and sought other avenues of altruistic self-actualisation.