I settled on this research question because I plan to become an oncologist one day and the National Institute of Health (NIH) funds much of the cancer research done in the United States. I believe that Congress should allocate more funds towards the NIH because they, in turn, provide funding to labs that research many of the deadliest diseases in the world. The research that I have conducted for the ILP's has only strengthened my position that the NIH should receive more funding. The NIH's funding of medical research is spread extremely thin and the research that I have done for the ILP's has shown me the full extent of this.

Over the summer before my freshman year of high school, my grandmother was diagnosed and died from lung cancer. I stood by and watched as she turned into the shell of the woman she once was. Kneeling in the pew at her funeral I realized that my calling in life was to fight this pernicious malady. I am extremely interested in this research topic because I want to become an oncologist and to perform cancer research. Due to this, I will most likely have to receive some funding from the NIH in order to conduct my research. When the government invests more in the NIH, my projects, as well as other's, will have a better chance of being funded. This will lead to a greater understanding of the underlying mechanisms of cancer and hopefully lead us to the ultimate goal of a cure for this terrible disease. Not only will this greater funding increase our understanding of cancer, it will go a long way in finding a cure for diseases such as Alzheimer's, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, and many other ailments that afflict people across the globe. 

I hold a vested interest in this topic for the reasons explained above and because I am currently conducting research that is funded by the NIH. But, almost everyone is a stakeholder in this argument because the diseases that are being researched in labs funded by the NIH will, probably and unfortunately, touch the lives of most every person in the world in some way.

This research question is very closely related to my personal values. I believe that scientific research should be granted much more funding than it currently receives because humans, as a race, are extremely curious. This curiosity has allowed us to unravel many of the mysteries of the universe and the world around us. This endless search for knowledge has revealed how little we truly know about even our own bodies and should provide even greater incentive to fund this type of research. When I came into this project, I held the same point of view but my opinion was not quite as strong. I can avoid bias in this piece by providing purely facts and proving that this is a not a partisan issue. I can also avoid bias by including the other side of the argument, the idea that the government should not be spending more money and putting the country further into a deficit. This argument is flawed though because I have found several studies conducted by the US government showing that for every dollar invested in medical research, $3.65 are saved in hospital expenditures and longevity is increased which is valued at fifteen times the expenditures made by the NIH. 

I do not know of any current bills that are in the process of being drafted or voted on that will allow for greater or reduced funding of the NIH. Hopefully with more research, I will be able to find this out and include this new information in my paper. 

With my argument, I hope to garner a greater funding of the National Institute of Health or at least, I hope to enlighten a few people on the necessity of this idea. I truly believe that I will be able to effectively address this research question in an eight to ten-page paper because there are so many ways to argue for an increase in spending on the NIH. This is not a partisan issue and it should not be treated as such. The benefits that will come from this potential funding are innumerable. It will be very easy to articulate these benefits because they are so overwhelming in nature. 

Of the sources that I have found, two have been argumentative and two have been scholarly papers. The two argumentative pieces both stood in agreement with my point of view but did express the other side of the argument. The only argument that people have been making against greater funding of the NIH was that it would only add to the ever growing United States deficit. Both sides are in consensus that funding the NIH will lead to better treatments and cures for disease than are currently available. This should be reason enough to provide this funding for the NIH but, unfortunately, it is not. 

I do not believe that I will need to revise my research question as I move forward toward a working thesis because my question is fairly narrow as it is. I may be able to focus in a little more on just why the NIH should allocate more money towards cancer research but this may narrow my argument too much and that would force me to make a much more difficult argument. That argument would pit two awful diseases against one another in the fight for greater funding and constructing this argument would provide an exceptional challenge. An example of this would be, why, in the future, should cancer research receive greater funding than Alzheimer's when it already receives nearly five times as much? As you can see, this would not be an easy argument to make. On the spectrum of scope and complexity, I believe that my research question is right where it needs to be. Several bills that have been put up to increase the NIH's funding and have been voted down with clear partisan lines illustrating that this is a fairly controversial topic. 
