What is Biomedical Research?

There isn’t a day that goes by that biomedical research doesn’t affect our lives.

The public’s awareness of healthy lifestyle choices, many of which have been identified through research, has helped reduce mortality rates and has become the best medicine in preventing needless disease and disabilities. With the reduction in cigarette smoking, deaths caused by heart disease have dropped substantially. The healthy lifestyle choices we’ve made have forced change in public accommodations and even the way restaurants cook.

For example, without biomedical research each of the following things would happen in the United States:

• Polio would kill or cripple thousands of unvaccinated children and adults this year.
• Most of the 3 million insulin-dependent diabetics would be dead.
• About 72 million people would be at risk of death from heart attack, stroke or kidney failure from lack of medication to control their high blood pressure.
• More than 1.4 million people would lose vision in at least one eye because cataract surgery would be impossible.
• Death would be a certainty for the nearly 20,000 patients who receive kidney transplants each year.
• Doctors would have no chemotherapy to save the 85 percent of children who now survive acute lymphocyte leukemia.
• The number and variety of medications that keep HIV infections under control would not be available.
• New surgical procedures to repair congenital heart defects, spine defects and brain trauma would have to be abandoned or tried for the first time on children.
• Methods to prevent many cancers never would be found because theories about genetic and environmental causative factors cannot be tested in humans.
• Instead of being eradicated, naturally occurring smallpox would instead continue unchecked and many others would join the 2 million people already killed by the disease since 1900.