Academic atrophy.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed medical students around the country are interviewing for residencies. Stop to talk to any random assortment, and everyone's goals will sound eerily similar. Can you hear it..? They’re all singing to the tune of an “academic” career. Sadly, this week’s Nature article is going to muffle some of those unadulterated ambitions. As the pool of qualified of researchers grows and grows, the funding to support them seems to dwindle. Last year, the National Institute of Health (NIH) was the country’s biggest research sponsor and was recently recognized for its enormous impacts on translated clinical outcomes. But its inflation-adjusted budget is down from 15 years ago, as is the proportion of top-tier journal pubs produced by US researchers. And the further proposed budget cuts are going to be hard to square with the wildly-popular Cancer Moonshot initiative...because one thing is certain: cancer’s not going to be launched into space until there’s funding behind the wind-up.