are dialing back research and development of new medicines because they can't afford or they're unwilling to take the risk of the cost of bringing one new drug to market can be more than $1 billion. most companies are spending much more on selling the product than developing new ones. should the government, yeah, should the government be in the business of helping the giant drug companies and how will this new investment affect future trips to the pharmacy? gardner harris joins us to talk about this. gardner, okay, the project is being run by the national institutes of health, which traditionally, everybody knows, normally focused on research. explain how this idea for the new medicine development center came about. >> reporter: well, it's come about because the director of the nih is francis collins, in charge of the human genome project, and when he was in charge of it he said that the human genome product was the most important thing ever done by humans because he predicted it would lead to a vast array of