Sir

Brian Martinson in his Commentary 'Universities and the money fix' (Nature 449, 141–142; 2007) suggests that short-sighted greed for federal grants motivates academic leadership to sacrifice the future interests of biomedical research. On the contrary, such grants do not cover the full costs of the research projects they support.

The annual shortfall of billions of dollars (see C. A. Goldman and T. Williams Paying for University Research Facilities and Administration Rand, Santa Monica; 2000) must be offset from the limited sources of discretionary funds available to universities: tuition fees, state funding, philanthropy, technology transfer or revenues derived from the clinical practice of the faculty.

Of these, philanthropy is serendipitous and generally attracts investment in new initiatives rather than in sustaining existing programmes. The pressures on tuition costs and clinical-practice margins have been widely publicized. Technology transfer only rarely brings significant, sustainable revenues.

If academic institutions merely sought to maximize short-term revenues, they would not make the substantial long-term commitments of capital to physical plant, state-of-the-art technologies and skilled personnel that they do.

We believe that the expansion of research capacity is being driven instead by the explosive pace of advances in the biomedical sciences and in our understanding of the processes of health and disease, as well as by mounting dependence on multidisciplinary research teams and increasingly sophisticated new technologies.

These investments are inherently risky in their anticipation of future returns from federal and other sponsored research. Accordingly, the decision-making behind them is deliberate and calculated: university governing boards, bound by their fiduciary obligations, are inherently conservative.

The distress caused by National Institutes of Health budgets that have steadily declined in purchasing power since 2003 is being widely and acutely felt. But increases in these budgets are unlikely; simply sustaining the enterprise to keep pace with inflation — which Martinson terms “prudent” — has been difficult.

The biomedical research enterprise does need to adapt to fiscal realities, but restructuring the historic 'business model' for academic research, including the composition of its workforce, will be very difficult. At minimum, such restructuring must be guided by sensitivity to the institutions' missions, recognition of the intense sociopolitical expectations of them and accurate perception of what is necessary for their academic and economic survival.