Within Our Grasp, Or Slipping Away? Assuring a New Era of Scientific and Medical Progress is a twenty one page report written by Johns Hopkins University and seven other institutions.

These institutions petitioned Congress not to let biomedical research funding stagnate. The scientists say that funding for cancer, Alzheimer's disease and spinal cord injury research is not keeping up with the times.

The scientists argued years of stagnant budgets for the National Institute of Health interrupted promising research and drove young investigators into other careers.

"Warning bells should be sounding loudly in Congress and among the public, " said Edward Miller, Hopkins dean and CEO. "The world's premier biomedical research engine is at risk"

Currently, eight of ten research grant applications are going unfunded, according to the report and principal investigators are spending more time raising funds instead of conducting research.

Let's say you do not work in the scientific or medical fields but someone told you that you just might be the one to find a cure for cancer -- would you say -- no way! It's possible. From the comfort of your own home, while you are cooking, or sleeping, or taking a shower, a cure for cancer could be found because of you. If you have a computer, Internet access and a willingness to share your unused time online, a project called Rosetta@home, can use it for biomedical research.

Rosetta@home is working to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that might ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases, including cancer. According to Rosetta@home, by running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don't need it you will help them speed up and extend research in ways they cannot possibly attempt without you. In a process called distributed computing, the project takes a massive calculation, break it into chunks, and send the chunks across the Internet to be processed by tens of thousands of personal computers. Then all the bits and pieces are retrieved and the information reconstructed at a central computer. For more information on becoming a part of this innovative project, visit Rosetta@home.