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Published online 4 February 2009 |
Nature
457,
650-655
(2009)
| doi:10.1038/457650a
Updated online: 13 February 2009
News Feature
Research funding: Closing arguments
The battle to keep a lab funded can be long and painful. Meredith Wadman meets two researchers who may be close to hanging up their coats.
At 9:25 p.m. on Wednesday 15 October 2008, Jill Rafael-Fortney sat down at her home-office computer and wrote an e-mail to Michael Ostrowski, the chair of her department at Ohio State University in Columbus.
"Mike, I didn't get either of my grants.
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I'm in the same boat, unfortunately. Both my R01s were rejected just above the funding line this week. I'm closing my lab down. I'll just teach my classes and take 3 months off in the summer.
The graph shows that, while the funding for NIH doubled, the number of funded Research Project grants increased only very slightly over the same time period. Very little of the money seems to have been earmarked for RO1 grants. In fact the % of the budget allocated to RO1 grants must have decreased for the '98-08 period (or individual grant values increased). Does anyone know where I can find stats on the distribution of NIH budget for the years in question? I'd like to see how the NIH distributed its budget over this time period and how it changed.
why are we still reading about this stuff? i want to hear about how the NIH holds PI's feet to the fire when it comes to PI's proposed experiments and what the PI actually does, and how the *health* of us all is improving. many grants are basic science that could be NSF or something. and the NIH could quit playing games and do some real help by putting on their website "if you have such-and-such credentials, you will not get funded", instead of encouraging everyone and their uncle to submit a grant so they can make the "success rate" (is it really a 'rate'?) look so much more selective. as was said years ago, the system is broken. field change? maybe PI's can apply for a Ph.D. program! let me google for "ph.d. physics"....
Why does NIH promote such a boom-and-bust scientific economy? We all know that a lot of good work can be done with small budgets, which could eventually justify a large dose of funding. Why not automatically give smaller grants to the second tier of proposals? This should encourage more risk-taking and, possibly, reduce the total number of grant applications, as PIs will be more confident about getting at least some funding when they do apply, so will more likely to delay an application until they feel ready.
This is a really timely article. There's been a steady murmuring undercurrent of trouble, and I'm glad these issues are now being openly discussed on a larger stage. I think the largest issue is the slippage of the US relative to other countries. An economic argument can be made that economic growth depends on the creation of new markets which are opened up by new technology. A current example of this would be personalized medicine, but tons of older examples exist in medical instrumentation such as MRI and services such as Lasik eye surgery. Balancing the need for increased spending to further economic growth with the need to spend more effectively during this economic downturn means that we need to get much *better* about deciding which research is worth funding, not just more strict about who gets it, and this is where the tricky part is. How does one incentivize the detailed level of peer review that is needed to properly assess applications? This is where the dysfunction lies, I think, because there's more and more research to review, but the traditional rankings devised from impact factors don't take this kind of work into consideration, rather, they promote the opposite behavior, that of creating more work for reviewers. If a better system were developed to properly credit people for their review and assessment work, the money could be spent more effectively.
With an average of 50% (or more) Indirect Cost plus huge percentage of salary of PI (faculty of the university), more than one third of total NIH fund are allocated to universities. This is a good deal especially for those medical schools and private schools. If "Tayoto automobile" was planning to open a facility to boost the economy, the company advertised to hire skilled workers, under one condition: they have to bring their own salary, salary and benefit of their assistants or trainees, tools (M&O), pay their administrative expenses, electricity, water, and contributing to building the factory... The skilled worker can proudly announce that they work for "Tayoto". They work for 30 years, and at the time when they cannot bring in the money, they are about to leave, -- the fate of highly educated slaves. This looks like how universities operate, especially medical schools and private schools. Why should NIH support such system? A suffering scientist
"If the NIH is turning towards a more clinically focused and translational-medicine emphasis, then it is researchers' responsibility to figure out how their research can fit in". A researcher's responsability is to do the best science they can. That is why they do research. Administrators' and science politicians' responsability is to find ways to ensure that the best scientists do their best work. That is their job. No-one who does not understand these basic principles should be working as a scientist, administrator or politician.
I can't believe that an NIH administrator would say "Unfortunately you're not a giant in the field and you're not at Harvard." That is outrageous. I thought the system was merit-based? Maybe it is time for blind double blind reviews at the NIH (to open that can of worms)?
To monk t: Apparently you, many administrators and lawmakers are not aware of the fact that many medical breakthroughs (eg antibiotics) are a result of basic science that has nothing to do with the eventual application. This has been detailed many times, for example in the excellent "Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs", by Morton A. Myers. I'd suggest you read it.
It is pretty clear and simple what happened. NIH doubled the budget over 5 years. Universities and research institutes went for this money without regulation and NIH had no regulations either. The number of faculty in med schools grew very quickly, but the numbers in departments where faculty are funded by university contract lines (non federal money) stayed about the same. You too can be a university prof. if you can generate your own source of all funding. Then NIH said PI's can pay themselves on NIH grants to a max. of about $200K per year. Boy it seemed like all of a sudden most of my colleagues in med schools regardless of years since PhD were making close to 200K. They wrote themselves a check from their NIH grants. In departments where hard money faculty exist, salaries are based on regulated merit increases decided by a democratic process of dividing up the money that was alloted (typically 1-2% increases per year). That in a nutshell is where most of the NIH money went. Yes some went to big science programs but most of it went to the near doubling of soft money departments in universities and in massive increases and creation of research institutes. The only way out now is to come up with reasonable regulation by NIH and to enforce this with universities that take on NIH money. There is room for soft money faculty in soft money departments, but NIH has to negotiate with each university how many there should be within the confines of the budget. In the meantime we will all just fight like dogs until many of us go out of business at a ratio of probaly ~10/1 soft money to hard money labs. Shame on the med school officials and the NIH officials that allowed this to happen. Yes I have a biased response since I am in a hard money department, but I have a contract negotiated with my university, and I competed with 200 applicants to get my job. At many med schools, some postdocs just stay on a become junior faculty members. If we had some rules that fit with the budget, we would not be in this mess.
http://bluelabcoats.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/falling-below-the-line-is-your-proposal-just-not-good-enough/ http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/02/running_out_of_grant_funding.php
Can someone please tell me how the personal lives of these two scientists is relevant to the discussion or any of our business? This article started as a timely discussion of the problems facing researchers and then completely went off the rails to resemble something out of Star Magazine. Very unprofessional
So finally science is also a financial (and intellectual) "Ponzi scheme"... Promises-promises-promises, profits-profits-profits, success-success-success, until a black day when suddenly - bang! - and there's nothing but empty promises, falling profits, absent results and crowds of fruitless parasites in the system with their numbers of useless papers in "top" journals... God can only help those who really want to change something for better in that decadent empire of lie...
Kudos to our founding agencies. They have done a great job in pushing talented students away from doing science and even a better job in knocking out experienced researchers.
It is nice to see that the NIH is just as inept and incestuous as the SEC. "Unfortunately you're not a giant in the field and you're not at Harvard." Whether it be funding or publishing, apparently these are the only two standards in the old boys club of academia.
The structure of research requires that almost everyone's career be ruined. The work funded by all these grants is not done by their recipients, but by their grad students and postdocs. A tiny percentage of these--even among the brightest and hardest working--will ever even get a shot at being an independent investigator. Working in a lab for sub-starbucks wages for over a decade of grad school and postdocs requires a peculiar form of passion. This passion for and experience with basic research does not prepare you well, or at all, for the "other" careers that are hyped as alternatives for the 90%+ of academic also-rans. Universities maintain the blatant lie that you are preparing for a large, diverse selection of rewarding career paths because the PIs need warm bodies at the bench hours 70 hours a week. SO...I don't know why we're all supposed to care deeply about these early-to-mid career flame-outs considering the carnage that comes at the postdoc-PI transition. The U.S. is training WAY TO MANY scientists. The way science is done now, we hardly need any "trained" scientists, we only need the constantly turning over pool of science trainees. This cannon fodder does the work, and they do it cheap. I don't know what the solution is, but as for people who don't get their R01: Boo effing hoo. It's a fart in a s***storm of disillusionment and disappointed career ambitions. I hear that Midwestern Purgatory Community College is hiring to teach 6 sections of introductory biology to business majors. Get in line.
Nature has posted an update on this story: On 10 February 2009, Darcy Kelley learned that her third and final application for an R01 renewal will be awarded funding by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The same grant had previously been rejected for falling below the 10th percentile. Story Landis, director of the institute, made a decision to move the institute?s funding cut-off for grant applications to the 11th percentile after a re-evaluation of the institute?s funding obligations. The change meant that Kelley ? and another 7 investigators whose applications had fallen between the 10th and 11th percentile in two recent funding rounds ? got funded. Small readjustments to funding cut-offs often occur at NIH institutes as the staff monitor how much money is being spent and how much is left. For instance, if enrolment in a costly clinical trial is slower than expected, then spending on the trial in that financial year is reduced, freeing up funds that can be directed to other grants. ?The general strategy is that we start off the fiscal year conservatively, setting the payline at a level we are pretty sure we can afford,? says Robert Finkelstein, director of the extramural division at NINDS. As the fiscal year progresses, ?we are able to get a little bolder?, he says. Posted by Helen Pearson, Biology features editor for Nature
There is also a Nature opinion forum on the crisis of confidence in scientific careers here http://network.nature.com/groups/naturenewsandopinion/forum/topics/3901?page=1