In his editorial, “The Reality and the Promise”, Siegfried Othmer discussed the NIH’s lack of interest in supporting neurofeedback research. The NIH’s failure to pursue investigations into a treatment modality as clearly valuable and underutilized as neurofeedback reflects a larger evolving crisis in biomedical research. The psychiatrist and editor of Medical Hypotheses Bruce Charlton argues that, “it is unlikely that current patterns of medical science funding will yield the hoped-for advances in therapeutics that provide the main justification for expanding the input of resources. Too much expansion, too narrowly channeled, for too long, has probably led to increasing inefficiency, with diminishing returns from ever-greater spending.”Consider, for example, the three largest NIH grants awarded in 2005:
- $53 million to MIT to “Generate high quality genome sequence”
- $46 million to Washington University to “Improve informatics tools, produce genome sequence”
- $33 million to Baylor College of Medicine to “Produce draft sequences of the rhesus macaque and bovine genomes”