AAMC President Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., sent a letter last week to congressional leadership urging them to provide additional funding for the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2007. The letter states, "If the NIH budget is maintained at the [fiscal year] 2006 level, the agency will have lost more than 9 percent of its purchasing power (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in the last four years.... We face the very real danger of eroding the vitally important scientific infrastructure we all have worked so hard to build." Congress has not yet voted on appropriations legislation to fund the NIH for the remainder of fiscal year 2007; the agency is currently being funded at the 2006 level through a congressional continuing resolution. For more information, please visit http://www.aamc.org/advocacy/library/laborhhs/corres/2007/012207.pdf.