A provocative new study by two biologists appears at first glance to highlight a worrisome paradox: As the nation's investment in the science that underlies new therapies has increased over the past half century, the output that we actually care about most -- advances in health -- appears to be slipping.

If the federal investment in biomedical research is really getting less efficient over time by yielding fewer new drugs and additional years of life, that would be a clear call to reexamine policy. After all, the goal of the roughly $30 billion spent by the National Institutes of Health each year isn't merely to provide jobs for scientists and create reams of erudite scientific papers, but to help people live longer and better. But the analysis, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises far more questions than it answers and may in fact reveal how little we know about how to measure the bang for our buck when it comes to funding the insights and innovations that improve health ...Read more »