Funding for aging biology research within NIA has remained around 0.5% of the total NIH budget.

“their budget for biology all put together is only one sixth of the ni budget and for the kind of biology I care about it's much much less than that uh a lot of the good biology is what happens to Bone aging what happens to eye aging what happens to uh aging of the immune system that's interesting research but the of course the kind of stuff I care most about is aging as a global phenomenon what can you do to slow aging and how is it that aging uh increases your risk basically of almost everything that you don't want to happen to you that part of the Nia budget is small”

“if you are a cardiologist researcher or an oncologist researcher or an AIDS researcher or an Alzheimer's researcher anytime somebody says you know you the smart play is to reduce your budget by 10% or your institute's budget by 10% we're going to go there faster if we spend money on aging and its relationship to the disease you care about you you get uh the porcupine defense”

“the Zero Sum game uh is a pretty good analogy for what's actually going on the amount of research dollars at least available to NIH is not infinitely expansible it's set by complex political process and then um there's a separate Downstream process that allocates it amongst uh institutions”

“the percent of NIH budget that goes to biology of Aging I think is still probably around half of 1%”

“how much goes to this type of research it was about 350 million a few years ago it might be a little higher than that but I don't think it's ticked up any more proportional to the increase in NIH budget since then so that it reaches about half of 1%”

“most of the people making those decisions were not trained in aging research they view it as something interesting I read something about that in Time Magazine the other day but they don't understand that to actually conquer or slow down or affect or protect against the disease they care about the smart play is to do aging research”