The stimulus package contains billions of dollars of funding for the National Institutes of Health — money that could create a quick financial jolt for young workers and university towns.

There are 3,000 institutions around the country that receive NIH grants to fund biomedical research. Raynard Kington, the NIH’s acting director, says those labs are also well-positioned to absorb a jolt of financial stimulus quickly.

“We have literally 14,000 applications that have been peer reviewed, that have been found to be scientifically meritorious and that have been approved for funding — but that we don’t have funds to support,” he says.

Give the NIH the money, he says, and in just a few weeks the money can flow out the door and into a thousand labs or more.