Testing R&D

The payback on Maine’s $10 million investment through its Biomedical Research Fund has started to come in, suggesting just how underfunded many of the state’s most important research institutions are. The results are good reason for lawmakers to continue spending on R&D and equally good reason to pay attention to the first comprehensive review of these investments, which began Tuesday.

The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor received more than $6 million of the state support to help build a genetic resources building and promptly leveraged another $30 million from the National Institutes of Health. The Maine Medical Center Research Institute in South Portland used just under $1 million in state money to expand its work in heart and bone disease and cancer, attracting an added $11 million from NIH. The Foundation for Blood Research in Scarborough used $81,000 for a computer upgrade and managed to leverage $6 million in NIH and other grants.

The 10 institutions that received the state money, including the University of Maine, have more than quintupled the initial investment, carrying out important research, creating hundreds of new jobs in emerging fields of medicine and health and spinning off more than $100 million in related benefits. These results are among the most positive for Maine’s economy in a year that is bringing an unexpectedly high number of layoff notices.

But as the Maine Science and Technology Foundation has observed, Maine should know more about the effect of the public R&D investment. The foundation was authorized by the last Legislature to bring together national-level reviewers to look at Maine’s $40 million annual investment in R&D and measure it for competitiveness, impact and innovation. The investment is relatively new and the evaluation is an ongoing process, but it should tell lawmakers how well the money is being spent, where it could be more effective and how the state can find further ways to attract matching dollars.

Maine has a long way to go before it catches up to the effort made for research and development in most states. It is clearly making progress; the foundation’s review should point out how much and how to make more.