Battelle Report
Return on Investment
12/06/13 16:28 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
A new report from United for Medical Research and Battelle claimed that while the US government invested about $14.5 billion between 1988 and 2012 in the Human Genome Project, it has reaped $59 billion in tax revenue and $965 billion in economic impact. The report further suggests that the investment has lead to 53,000 genomics-related jobs and $293 billion in personal income. S. Pelech notes the timing of the release of the report with the reduction of NIH research funding through the sequestration, and challenges some of the conclusions of the study. He notes that there has been essentially no growth in employment in any of the various genomics sectors in the last 5 years. Read More...
A Good Return
14/02/13 16:08 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
In his recent State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama made mention of how for every dollar the US government invested to map the human genome, $140 was returned to the US economy. This was based on a 2011 report by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, which calculated the direct, indirect, and induced impacts of human genome sequencing on employment, personal income, output, and tax revenue. S. Pelech challenges the accuracy of these estimates and pointed out that private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects really made the major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have been targeted by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry to date. He also takes issue with the claims of the actual direct economic and scientific benefits of the Human Genome Project. Read More...