A “luminary in the constellation of cancer fighters” bemoans the lack of science funding in the US

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Dr. Frederick Alt, a 66-year-old Harvard professor of genetics, recently received the Szent-Györgyi Prize from the National Foundation for Cancer Research for a twofold breakthrough. Decades ago, Alt upended conventional wisdom of human genome behavior when he discovered that cancer cells had the capacity to genetically amplify themselves, allowing them to spread, become more dangerous and resist treatments.

From there, he discovered how chromosomes recognize the "machinery" that keeps their genomes stable -- machinery that cancer cells lack. That led to a better understanding of how to protect DNA from the sort of critical damage caused by many cancers. It was research that another speaker called "foundational."

Sen. Ed Markey, the keynote speaker who preceded Alt onstage, described him as a "luminary in the constellation of cancer fighters."

Funding for the National Institutes of Health, the main federal spigot for biomedical research like Alt's, has bipartisan support among lawmakers. In recent weeks, a number of high-profile lawmakers have called for investments in the NIH to be dramatically increased, and for Congress to cut spending elsewhere to pay for it. But most people expect that this fall, biomedical research will remain under-addressed.

Already, the NIH's spending capacity has dropped more than 20 percent over the past decade. The success rate for applicants has sunk into the teens, and the average age of first-time grant recipients has risen to 43 years old. Had the landscape been this bad when he was first pursuing his studies, Alt said, the possibility of his breakthroughs would have been dramatically diminished.

“It wouldn’t have changed my goal of doing [cancer research] because I think when most of us went into it, we were just excited about doing it," he said. "I think where it would have changed the trajectory is there probably would have been a much lower chance of being able to jump into it and succeeding, and probably along the way, you would be out of it."

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