IT PAYS TO TAKE RISKS IN SCIENCE FUNDING

When UC Berkeley biochemist Jamie Cate approached funding agencies with his idea to help researchers design antibiotics to combat drug-resistant bacteria, they said it couldn't be done. But they took a gamble on Cate, a young professor, and it paid off. Today, using intense X-ray beams, Cate produces the sharpest images yet of key proteins targeted by antibiotics, paving the way for more effective bacteria killers.

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RESEARCH FUNDS STAGNATE

Once the world's gold standard, American scientific enterprise is in free fall. Short of government funds and strapped for cash, researchers across the country are abandoning promising avenues of scientific investigation and, increasingly, the profession of science itself.

The worry, say policy experts, is not just the curtailment of innovative research, but a reduction in potential treatments for hundreds of human diseases.

The 2008 congressional appropriations bill, which dramatically cut money to federal research institutions, already has had "a disastrous effect on science, causing irreparable harm to the nation's science and technology enterprise," according to the American Physical Society.

An emergency supplementary bill passed by Congress last week allocates an additional $275 million to be distributed among the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, but it did little to stem the pessimism.

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