BETHESDA - — BETHESDA - - President Barack Obama toured a Maryland cancer lab Wednesday to promote the awarding of $5 billion in new government health science grants, which he described as the "largest single boost to biomedical research in history."
The National Institutes of Health grants, distributed in recent weeks to more than 12,000 projects around the country, are funded under the $787 billion federal stimulus program that Obama signed into law in February. In all, about $100 billion in stimulus money is to go to science and technology projects, according to the administration.
At least 441 of the grants were awarded to recipients in Maryland, according to preliminary NIH information. A total of 257 grants went to researchers at the Johns Hopkins University and 96 to projects at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
The stimulus program is "not just about creating make-work jobs. It's about creating jobs that will make a lasting difference for our future," Obama told several hundred scientists at the NIH campus.
The White House said the grants will help generate tens of thousands of jobs, either directly in research or in businesses that supply laboratory equipment or will be involved in modernizing research facilities.
Obama briefly visited one of those labs, part of the National Cancer Institute's urologic oncology branch, where he peered through a microscope at a piece of brain tissue.
Later, before an audience of NIH employees and invited guests, he took a swipe at his predecessor, George W. Bush, though not by name, for politicizing science during his presidency.
In recent years, Obama said, U.S. leadership in medical innovation has slipped "as scientific integrity was at times undermined and research funding failed to keep pace."
Dr. Francis Collins, appointed by Obama as NIH director, introduced the president as "our scientist in chief" and expressed gratitude for "a president who values science" and "respects its independence."
More than $1 billion of the stimulus grant money will go to research stemming from the Human Genome Project, which Collins formerly headed. Since the first human genome was sequenced less than 10 years ago, researchers have sequenced the genomes of about a dozen other organisms. The new research is expected to enable scientists to sequence more than 2,300 complete genomes, according to NIH.
