Translating Biomedical Research to the Bedside

Abstract

The doubling of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget in recent years,^1,2 the publication of the initial sequence and analysis of the human genome in 2001,^3,4 and advances in molecular biology, neuroscience, immunology, biomedical engineering, and functional magnetic resonance imaging suggest that these remarkable achievements in clinical and basic science research are being successfully translated to the clinic and bedside. There is an assumption that the recent exponential growth of scientific information about disease, as evidenced by the substantial increase in the numbers of published articles in biomedical journals, heralds a rapid move to improve human health.