About the Seminar

September 24, 2025 9:00am—10:30am

In the summer 2025 edition of Issues in Science and Technology, Jeffrey Alexander and Rossana Zetina-Beale summarized a recent study characterizing and quantifying the social and economic benefits generated by the Intramural Research Program (IRP) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). While much of the discussion on the impact of NIH focuses on the billions of dollars in grants and contracts NIH issues each year to outside organizations, about $5 billion of its fiscal year 2024 budget supported work by nearly 6,000 research staff at NIH laboratories (mostly housed on the agency’s campus in Bethesda, MD). With its vast reach and resources, why does NIH conduct research in its own facilities?

Dr. Alexander will describe how his team worked with the NIH Office of Technology Transfer to analyze records for thousands of agreements from 1980 to 2021 granting firms licenses to use technologies and materials invented at the IRP. By linking this internal dataset to public databases, the study team showed that disseminating these technologies produced substantial benefits to the biomedical research community, to the national economy and workforce, and to public health. Moreover, Dr. Alexander will explain why focusing on the only potential financial returns from NIH’s technology licensing fails to capture the full value of the IRP and obscures the critical role of federal intramural research in the U.S. science and engineering enterprise.

Links

• Recording Link