UPDATE:

Prepared Obama remarks:

“We know that this kind of investment will also lead to new jobs: tens of thousands of jobs conducting research, manufacturing and supplying medical equipment, and building and modernizing laboratories and research facilities. I’ve long said, the goal of the Recovery Act was not to create make-work jobs, but jobs making a difference for our future. There is no better example than the jobs we will produce or preserve through the grants we are announcing this morning.”

According to the White House release, the NIH grant awards will support the full spectrum of medical research—from basic research to clinical and translational studies. The Recovery Act funded NIH grants are in several areas including heart disease, autism, HIV-AIDS, H1N1 Flu and cancer.

More from the White House: More than $1 billion of the grant funding is dedicated to research applying the technology produced by the Human Genome Project between 1990 and 2003. This new funding will allow researchers to make quantum leaps forward in studying the genomic changes linked to cancer, heart, lung, and blood disease and autism– potentially leading to new treatments and cures. The investment includes $175 million for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to collect more than 20,000 tissue samples from more than 20 cancers, and determine in detail all of the genetic changes in thousands of these tumor samples. TCGA involves more than 150 scientists at dozens of institutions around the country. All data will be rapidly deposited in databases accessible to the worldwide research community.

“We are about to see a quantum leap in our understanding of cancer,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “Cancer is a disease of DNA—it occurs when glitches in the DNA cause a good cell to go bad. This ambitious effort promises to open new windows into the biology of all cancers, transform approaches to cancer research and raise the curtain on a more personalized era of cancer care. This is an excellent example of how the Recovery Act is fueling discoveries that will fundamentally change the way we fight disease and improve our lives.”

Pickup original post here:

President Obama will announce $5 billion in new research grants funded by the $787 billion, two-year stimulus law at a ceremony today at the National Institutes of Health in nearby Bethesda, MD.

The institutes of health spends more than $30 billion a year on medical research. For a deeper look at what it spends where, see here:

This is the president's only public event of the day. He convenes a massive array of military and diplomatic advisers at 3 p.m. for the first of five strategy sessions on Afghanistan.

Obama will appear with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The doctors will join Obama on a tour of the lab facility on the NIH campus.

The White House says the grants will create "tens of thousands of jobs" in teaching, research and database management. It released no specific figures on the number of  jobs created and at what cost.

Meanwhile, a survey of private sector employers showed 254,000 private sector jobs were lost in September.

Read the Reuters report on the private sector jobs data here:

On a conference call with the nation's governors on Sept. 24, Vice President Joe Biden called the stimulus an unqualified success.

"In my wildest dreams I never thought it would work this well," Biden said.

Governors on the call - 20 Democrats and 10 Republicans - were urged to collect and submit quarterly numbers of the numbers of jobs created and saved through stimulus spending. Importantly, the governors were not required to distinguish between jobs saved and created. That data must be submitted by Oct. 10.

Biden told the governors the stimulus has sent "$150 billion bucks" to the states and $97 billion remains to be obligated

The White House tracks stimulus funds here:

Critics of the stimulus spending say it will create a raft of programs that will take on a legislative and fiscal life of their own,  morphing from one-time initiatives into permanent parts of the federal budget.

The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation found numbers in Congressional Budget Office analysis suggesting the stimulus price tag could balloon over the years. Read that take here: