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Cancer kills an estimated 13,000 New York City residents each year. Nationwide, there are more than 500,000 cancer-related deaths.

Since 2003, federal funding for biomedical research has flat lined.

"It's tremendously disturbing because it totally disrupts the research effort," said Dr. Andrew Schafer of Weill Cornell Medical College.

Experts say it has actually declined by about $3 billion, amounting to a loss of 13 percent. In human terms, the impact to patients and scientists is huge.

"Potentially, we're at real risk of losing the majority of the physician-scientist workforce," said Schafer.

Under the Clinton administration, the National Institutes of Health saw Congress double its budget. Dr. Harold Varmus the President of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, headed the NIH at the time.

"There was money in the Treasury, and a lot of excitement about biological research, and a lot hope for dealing with disease," he said.

Now after five years of stagnation, even the president's own Cancer Panel wrote a scathing report last month demanding more government funding. The report concluded that "...the U.S. biomedical research enterprise as a whole is being starved of funding at a critical juncture."

As a result, only 10 percent of scientists applying for grants from the NIH receive funding now, and most scientists do not receive grants large enough to start their own laboratories until they're in their 40s. Even those researchers who have already started projects are feeling the impact.

"Huge investments have been made to start research projects to train scientists and these research projects have had to be terminated," said Schafer.

While terminating these projects results in a huge waste of tax dollars, Senator Hillary Clinton says the greater price to pay is in the drop-off in scientific progress.

"We are beginning to see some significant damage to our medical research and our potential for making life-saving discoveries," she said.

The only answer some say is to substantially increase the NIH budget. But given the nation's economic woes, some experts, like Dr. Paul Howard from the Manhattan Institute, say the solution is for the private sector to step in and pick up the slack.

"It probably would be helpful for companies and academic medical centers and universities to enter into more cooperative agreements," said Howard.

No matter where the money comes from, experts say cancer research is in dire need of fresh funding.

"If we don't commit ourselves to a future that's based on information and science and discovery, the country is going to become second rate," Varmus said.