Dr. Heidi Ledford at Nature says physicists enjoy more generous funding, more commercial interest and more popular support than biologists.  

Thousands of physicists in the United States stopped reading right there.

While biology has an entire National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Johns Hopkins alone gets a $1 billion in research funding for the life sciences, physicists get...what again?  Even the Tevatron is closed. Brookhaven may be older than me.

Yet because the physics community was able to disclose they had a better idea where the Higgs boson was not in December, and it got some press, biologists are left wondering how they can also generate some cultural buzz.  Maybe it's time to promote a biological Higgs?

Well, we did have a biological Higgs Boson - a few times.  It was called a War on Cancer and then AIDS and then there was a Human Genome project.  Americans, at least, love biology a lot more than they love physics, even if biologists don't get written about in a Dan Brown novel. Obviously, instead of longing for a way to do better marketing and capture the public's imagination, go out and solve a fundamental problem and the publicity takes care of itself.  Physicists also don't spend much time ranting about politics on the Internet and biologists do an alarming amount of that so some cultural moderation would help get more bipartisan support for your field.

The NIH has a budget of $31 billion. The Department of Energy and NASA are apparently job works programs so their research contributions to actual physics are slight while the National Science Foundation (NSF) can barely get by with $7 billion, and physicists have to share that science funding with pseudoscience projects like if Farmville helps build personal relationships, analyzing group dynamics in EverQuest 2 or if maybe we are born Democrats or Republicans.

Once a month, NASA is finding a way to include 'may lead to the possibility of discovery of life elsewhere' so even they are helping biologists generate buzz.  And science media pumps out miracle vegetable cures and 'longevity' articles just as often so they are doing their part to promote the life sciences.

I'd say biologists are clearly way out in front culturally - at least in America.  Do a billion people want to kill physicists for searching for the God particle? Nooooo, but a lot of religious people are trying to kill biology education by claiming we are 6,000 years old. That means biology is more mainstream.

Ledford also throws some newer ideas out there for a 'biological Higgs', like searching for a shadow biosphere here on Earth. Otherwise, they're stuck with talking about life on other planets and starving mice so we can live longer.

Regarding the physics envy of 2012, there is a real chance the Higgs Boson will be a $10 billion 'does not exist' and the backlash from European politicians will be considerable - biologists should not want to emulate that. 

LINK:

Life-changing experiments: The biological Higgs by Heidi Ledford, Nature, March 28th 2012