The largest professional body representing US researchers in the life sciences is urging the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to nearly quadruple its contribution to a scheme that helps investigators pay for equipment costing over $100,000.

A survey carried out by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) found that about three-quarters of the 508 NIH-supported scientists who replied felt that the scheme, known as the Shared Instrumentation Grants (SIG) programme, is inadequately funded and managed.

Almost half of the respondents to the survey, the results of which were released in Washington this week, said a lack of financial support meant that their laboratories were not able to add research technologies as fast as they would like.

Although the NIH's overall budget has risen by 15 per cent in each of the last two years, FASEB points out that money for equipment has not kept pace. In particular, the SIG programme, which allows researchers already supported by NIH grants to split the cost of equipment costing over $100,000, has fallen in real terms over the past decade.

SIG was funded at $32.5 million for the financial year 1990 and $43.1 million in 2000; it suffered during the budget restrictions of the early 1990s and is only now beginning to recover. FASEB recommends that the programme receive $150 million in the financial year 2001.

Researchers are concerned about their ability to pay for the high-tech — and expensive — techniques on which they increasingly depend. In the past, such sentiments have been mostly anecdotal, so FASEB launched its survey last autumn to unearth more concrete evidence. The survey found that 84% of the respondents said that shared equipment was “extremely important” for their research.

David Speicher, the study's lead author, calls the $150 million demand “pretty conservative”, as it is based only on the number of investigators receiving R01 grants from the NIH.

“The scientific endeavour is moving in a direction where modern, expensive equipment is essential,” says Speicher, a professor of structural biology at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. “If you don't have the equipment, it impairs the research.”