Thought I'd pass along this article on the state of biomedical research funding at the NIH from the Washington Post. It points out something that everyone in science has been painfully, acutely aware of in the past year or two, but hasn't really seemed to make much headway in the national dialog.In a nutshell, the article is pointing out that the current funding climate at the NIH has gotten competitive to the point of being absurd. Way back in the day, the percentage of grants being funded in any given grant review session was at around 20%. In more recent years, it has fallen to 10%, which was still relatively reasonable and may arguably have been a better number for cutting out funding of the weaker grants that slip through. In the past year, however, the number has fallen to something like 5%. According to the article:
A flat budget, plus rising demand for new research dollars, equals plenty of angst in laboratories and science departments across the country. Although the number of grant applications has continued to rise, the percentage that win federal funding has shrunk from 32.1 percent in 2001 to 20 percent in 2006, according to NIH figures.The article quotes the overall percentage of grants that were eventually awarded (after multiple reviews, not just during one particular session), which is I think why their numbers are higher. However I'm very sure that in the past few rounds of grant review that my lab has participated in, the level of funding has hovered around 5-6%.
A number of people have argued that this is due to a previous surge in the level of funding during the bio-friendly heyday of the Human Genome Project (according to the article, the amount of NIH funding for biological research almost doubled between 1998 and 2003). To quote one comment on the above article:
The sudden boom in funding at the turn of the century led to the establishment of hundreds of new research centers and programs in universities across the country, all competing for a piece the giant new pot of gold that had suddenly become available. This created an over-supply of researchers and now the losers are starting to shake out.While the boom has no doubt contributed, it's not only the lower quality researchers that are losing out with the dramatically increased competition. I'm a grad student at Stanford, a school with more than its fair share of top-notch scientists (including recent Nobel laureates Andy Fire and Roger Kornberg [who works down the hall from my lab!]), and absolutely everyone is feeling the pinch from the most recent cut-backs. Three or four years ago, one of the professors I was rotating with was considering purposefully not renewing one of his R01's (the big grants given to lab heads by the NIH--many labs run their entire lab on one R01) to allow that money to go to other researchers that needed it more. Now, that idea is laughable. Almost every grant written can count on having to be submitted and revised at least three times before getting funding (if it gets funded at all), regardless of who's writing it and how good it is. And this is for established, well-respected researchers. I can't even imagine how the young professors just starting their labs are faring in this type of climate.
The practical consequences of this are that professors are writing more grants to hedge their bets, which means there are more grants to review, which brings the percentage that get funded even lower. This sends professors off to search for funding at private institutions like the Christopher Reeve Foundation and others. And while these institutions do a wonderful job of funding research aimed at curing their particular health problem, when we lose NIH funding we cut out the people doing basic science research that doesn't have an obvious, immediate clinical application. Some might argue that we should only be funding things that are directly medically oriented, but without money for basic science Andy Fire would never have been able to do the work which not only won him the Nobel prize, but also changed both the way we think of cellular biology and dramatically expanded the types of biological experiments we can do.
Anyway, this is one of the first major articles I've seen on the subject, and it's long overdue. The nation has been debating the idea of funding stem cell research passionately for the past year or two, and it's wonderful that the importance of biological research to the future of medicine is being highlighted in this way. However, the fact that researchers in every other biological field are struggling to remain afloat and that this too may hamper the progress of medicinal research deserves its share of the limelight as well.
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2 comments:
I stumbled upon your blog as a link from the Washington Post. Well written! I have worked with Stanford PIs (including Dr. Fire)and can understand the frustration with multiple resubmissions and the climate is especially fierce for new investigators.
Unfortunately for the scientists, funding is very political. Every agency in the government has had there 15 seconds of fame where their funding is doubled, like the Defense Department in the 80s, NIH in the 90s and now it is NSF's turn, unfortunately what comes after the years of budget increase are years of extreme scrutiny (the Office of Inspector General likes to audit to see where the money really went). Contrary to what is said this not only hurts the lower quality investigators but also those that are most experienced.
From the NIH and research administration point of view, I hear alot of scientist say "well this would have been funded years ago", it does show some inflexibility from scientists in not changing with the times.
Interesting comment. The more I read and hear about funding decisions, both of science and of other governmental programs, the more your words ring true.
Not too long after reading your comment, I was listening to KQED's Forum, and they were talking about the California budget. The same exact problem came up in reference to social welfare programs. Politicians love to look good by starting programs or dramatically increasing funding to existing ones. That's all well and good, but then in order to "not cut" programs but still have other things to dramatically fund and look good, they keep the funding of their new programs flat, ignoring even the rising cost of inflation, let alone any increased demand or costs of doing business. This leaves the social work organizations, which aren't about to abandon their missions, having to cut corners everywhere just in order to do the job they were originally fully funded to do.
I don't really see any way out of it, given the nature of government and politics, but it does seem like one of the fundamental problems with the system is that our legislators spend money like hares rather than tortoises. Maybe they should go back re-read their kids' nursery stories. :)
As far as your final comment on scientists' inflexibility... It seems to me that it's not exactly a stubborn refusal to change. After all, we're always trying to make our research, papers, and grants as good as we possibly can. It's more just the personal frustration of someone who has put hour upon hour of work into a grant only to have it miss the cutoff despite good reviews. Grant writing is rather miserable work (think 40-page single spaced term paper plus an enormous amount of paperwork). So when they don't go through due to seemingly artificially high cutoffs, 2-3 times as much time is spent writing each grant and of course the PIs get frustrated and hearken back to the good old days when things weren't so rough.
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