Washington

Senior advisers to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have called for a billion dollars a year to be spent on construction and renovation of biomedical research labs.

The proposed investment would dwarf the $75 million that Congress earmarked for construction from the biomedical agency's 2001 budget of $20 billion. But advocates of the change say that a boost in such spending is needed if research infrastructure is to keep pace with the doubling of the overall NIH budget between 1999 and 2003.

The recommendation was delivered in a report to acting NIH director Ruth Kirschstein on 7 June by a group commissioned in 1999 by outgoing NIH director Harold Varmus.

The group says that existing construction funding cannot keep pace with recent large increases in NIH funding for researchers. “We wanted ... people [to] understand you can't do research in a garage,” says William Brody, president of Johns Hopkins University, who chaired the group.

But NIH officials fear that Congress may respond to the request with money that the NIH could otherwise spend on grants to researchers. “If there was to be interest in putting more money in construction ... then they might try to find it somewhere else [in the NIH],” notes Kirschstein. She deferred a decision on the group's findings until the committee meets again in December.

Academic medical centres in the United States customarily pay for new laboratories themselves, hoping to recoup some of their costs from government grants.