clinical research, behavioral and social studies, health services delivery, and biomedical ethics.

Estimation of the cost of the new centers is based on outlays for the Claude Pepper Geriatric Centers. These institutions required about $1.2 million per year for support (Office of Geriatrics Branch, Biomedical Research and Clinical Medicine Program, NIA). Based on this information, the 10 additional centers should cost about $12 to $15 million per year to operate (not adjusted for inflation). Funding of the new centers goes largely toward administration costs, for infrastructure costs, and toward other supports, such as salaries for beginning investigators. Direct funds for research would not depend on center support, but would come rather from grants to individual investigators and to research programs operating within the centers.

Factors that make it difficult to assign costs for infrastructure research support to the different areas of research include the use of animal colonies by several disciplines for research, overlap of funds for research and infrastructure, development of databases that all disciplines may draw upon, and uncertainty in classifying new linkages to existing sources of information.

Given these constraints, the committee offers the following estimates for infrastructure costs.

Animal colonies Based on the cost in the Pepper Centers of $375,000 per animal colony per year (Office of Geriatrics Branch, Biomedical Research and Clinical Medicine Program, NIA), not adjusted for inflation, the estimated yearly costs of animal colonies at the 10 proposed geriatric research centers are $3.75 million; adding 10 animal colonies at other university centers engaged in gerontological research brings the total cost to $7.5 million per year.

Laboratories There are no comprehensive data on the cost of laboratories for basic biomedical and clinical research. Apart from laboratories at centers, funds are necessary to support noncenter laboratory needs in age-related basic biomedical and clinical research in other institutions. For example, three sophisticated laboratories for cell biology research to serve as regional resources for basic biomedical and clinical scientists would cost $3 million per year to staff and maintain (G.M. Martin, University of Washington, personal communication, 1989).