ON PAPER, the omens look good for medical research when the Bush
administration takes charge of the $20 billion budget of the National
Institutes of Health, by far the biggest kitty for health research in the world.
On the campaign trail, Bush promised to increase the NIH’s budget to
$27.3 billion, twice what it was in 1998.
But Bush and the religious right of his Republican party are unlikely to
stick to the priorities of the Clinton era. The proposed relaxing of rules last
year on research into stem cells taken from human embryos will be under pressure
from Republican…
