Despite these disturbing trends, there are currently no specialized treatment centers dedicated to serving our local communities. The university will also construct a 60,000 square-foot building adjacent to the University Hospital to house the institute. But the proposed cancer institute is only one part of the university's effort to bridge the traditional gap between basic science research and development of medical applications. Until the cancer center building is completed, the institute will occupy two floors in the Center for Molecular Medicine, a research annex to the Life Sciences Building scheduled to open next year. Although government funding for scientific research has declined in the last few decades, Congress has recently passed legislation to double the budget for the National Institutes of Health over the next five years.
Time is ripe for more investment in the life sciences.
The Center for Molecular Medicine will house institutes for the study of infectious diseases, structural biology, cell and developmental biology, and basic cancer research. One of the most urgent areas of biomedical research today is the study of infectious diseases, which have proliferated dramatically in the latter half of the century. Infectious agents constitute the leading cause of death worldwide, and rank only behind heart disease and cancer in the U.S., despite many breakthroughs in treatment and prevention. But ironically, microbiology students in the last few decades were often told that they were entering an obsolete field of study. Since the 60s, the incidence of infectious disease has gone up in spite of antibiotics and development of vaccines.