I don’t do this very often, but here’s a worthy cause for scientists and cancer researchers to rally around – Dr Steven Meltzer at Johns Hopkins established an online petition to the White House to increase funding to the NIH – the current proposal is to maintain the budget at a flat $30.7 billion.

Supporting the petition taught me something interesting – NIH funding created 350,000 jobs and contributed $50 Billion to the national economy in 2007 alone.

The problem, though, with flat budgets is that every 7 years the value of money halves, so the NIH budget has essentially been decimated over the last decade. This is sad for science, for progress and also for patients.

I was signature 7K odd, but this week has already seen an influx in new supporters that now rank nearly 10.5k strong, which is great progress.  Please take a moment to help support science and research – every vote counts!

Here’s the link to the White House NIH petition.