In response to two reports by the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has drawn up guidelines that will markedly improve the lot of its postdoctoral scientists.

Proposals to increase pay by 10–12% have drawn the loudest applause. According to Walter Schaffer, research training officer at the NIH, among institute directors, “There's strong support for the stipend increase.” Schaffer estimates that the rise will require a $100–200 million increase in the NIH budget.

The guidelines also establish time limits for graduate students and postdocs, and recommend that postdocs be moved to permanent staff positions after five years of training. Restructuring labs to include permanent research associates would alter the culture of US biomedical research substantially, but it remains unclear whether this change will be implemented widely.

“Most people who are doing longer postdocs feel that they're in a holding pattern ... and there simply are not enough [permanent] positions for the people that are being trained,” says Audrey Ettinger, co-chair of the Stanford University Postdoc Association. With a US population of postdocs that has more than doubled in the past 10 years to about 52,000, Ettinger had hoped that the NIH would move to reduce the number of new PhDs being produced. She adds, “I'm a little bit disappointed that they feel they're not in a position to control graduate enrollment—I think that's passing the buck onto universities.”

Another proposal is to monitor postdocs more closely. Maxine Singer, president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington and chair of the NAS committee that prepared one of the reports, says that data collection will facilitate further analysis of the research job market, and may also help illuminate a disturbing discovery that her committee made: based on data from the National Science Foundation, the NAS determined that female postdocs consistently receive lower pay than male postdocs.