NIH
Meaning of NIH: Most of what this agency does happens somewhere else, in laboratories it pays for rather than laboratories it owns.
Definition of NIH
The NIH, or National Institutes of Health, is the United States federal agency responsible for biomedical and public health research. Part of the Department of Health and Human Services, it runs laboratories and a research hospital of its own and, on a far larger scale, funds investigators at universities, medical schools and hospitals through competitive grants.
How is it organized?
The agency is a federation rather than a single body. It is divided into institutes and centers, each covering a disease area, an organ system, a stage of life or a scientific method, and each with its own director and its own budget appropriated by Congress. The National Cancer Institute, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Library of Medicine are among the better known. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, previously named the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is another. A central office sets policies that apply across all of them.
How does the funding work?
| Extramural | Intramural | |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | Scientists at outside universities, hospitals and institutes | Scientists employed by the agency itself |
| Where | Across the country and abroad | Chiefly on the agency campus, including its research hospital |
| Share of the budget | The large majority | The smaller portion |
Extramural money moves through peer review. An investigator submits an application, a panel of outside scientists scores it for scientific merit, and an institute's advisory council then judges how well it fits that institute's priorities before an award is made. The system is competitive, and the score a proposal receives usually decides its fate.
What else does it do?
Beyond paying for research, the agency trains the people who will do it, through fellowships and institutional training grants. It maintains public infrastructure that the whole field depends on, including the main biomedical literature database and the national registry where every clinical trial is recorded. It sets binding rules for the work it funds, covering protection of human participants, animal welfare, and the sharing of data and results. It also supports public information services, such as the Cancer Information Service, which translate research findings for people outside the field.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
The study was funded through a research grant from the NIH.
Good to know
The NIH funds and conducts research rather than providing direct clinical care to the public, which distinguishes its role from that of a hospital or treatment center.