The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is one of the wealthiest philanthropic organizations supporting biomedical research, but Dora Angelaki didn't want to become one of its investigators just for the money.

With funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA, her neurobiology lab at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, is hardly starved for cash. What she wanted was to embark on riskier projects that would be difficult to sell to conservative, federal research agencies. So when her colleagues encouraged her to enter the HHMI competition, she was eager to give it a go.

Unfortunately, as Angelaki soon discovered, the competition is open only to academic researchers who have been running a lab for between four and ten years. Angelaki has been at it since November 1993. And even with the two extra years that the HHMI allows to compensate for the fact that she had two children during that time, Angelaki missed the window by 18 months.

Her exclusion highlights what critics claim is a persistent problem for women scientists trying to become an HHMI investigator. Some argue that the institute's nominating practices and restrictive time limits hinder such career development — issues that the HHMI itself has recognized and taken steps to correct. But questions persist as to whether these steps go far enough.

Critics say it remains difficult for women to become investigators with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Credit: P. FETTERS/HHMI

The four-to-ten year window works very strongly against women.

“They've taken a huge step forward,” says Ben Barres, a neurobiologist at Stanford University in California. “But they still need to diversify their selection committees. And I think this four-to-ten-year window works very strongly against women.”

As a result of changes put forward in 2005 by the institute's president, Thomas Cech, the current competition is the first in which individuals can directly apply to the HHMI, rather than having to be nominated by a university. This is intended to make the process more open to women, minority groups and young scientists.

Nevertheless, some researchers would like the HHMI to go further. Barres says it should extend its window of eligibility from 10 to 16 years, to lessen the disadvantage faced by women who have had children soon after becoming assistant professors. But HHMI spokeswoman Avice Meehan says that the 10-year limit is important to enable the institute to maintain a pool of early-career investigators. And, she adds, applicants for the investigator competition are eligible for extensions on the basis of childcare, parent care or military service.

At present, 62 out of 299 HHMI investigators are female. That's not much different from the balance in the pool of faculty members from which the HHMI draws its candidates: at US research universities, women accounted for 30% of assistant and associate professors and just less than 20% of full professors in the life sciences in 2003, according to the National Academies. That means it will be hard to dramatically change the percentage at the HHMI, concedes Nancy Hopkins, a developmental biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

But Hopkins thinks it would be a good idea if the HHMI put more women on its powerful executive boards. “It's these powerful organizations and the people at the top that are really visible and send a strong message,” she says. Two of the eight members of the medical advisory board and four of the nineteen members of the scientific review board are female. Among the ten HHMI executive officers, Meehan is the only woman. “That is a male organization,” Hopkins says. “It just is.”

Cech has already pledged to increase the percentage of women on the review panels that select investigators. These panels have been between 22% and 30% female, but the panel for the 2008 competition has not yet been selected, says Meehan.

The community will be watching closely to see whether the present changes have the intended effect, but for Angelaki, they are too late. When she got notice that she was not eligible to become an HHMI investigator, she sent an e-mail back. “Thank you for your response,” she wrote. “It's too bad for both of us.”