NEW NIH Center Proposed

NIH has proposed to launch a new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), and has solicited feedback on this plan (http://feedback.nih.gov/index.php/ncats/faqs-ncats/#nine). The new Center would subsume the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), which is the home of the Shared Instrumentation Grant (SIG) program that is a major source of funding for flow cytometers, cell sorters, and imaging systems for US researchers. While NIH has indicated that they have no plans at this time to eliminate any of existing NCRR's programs, the impact of a new beaurocracy on these is unclear. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) has been following these developments and wrote a letter recommending delaying any action on this plan until the consequences on existing programs are better understood. See more on this at the FASEB web site