washington

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) working group that reported last spring (see above) found a common complaint among R29 recipients it interviewed: funds were so paltry that they were forced to spent large amounts of time writing applications for other grants to meet their laboratory costs.

Jais Lingappa, 38, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, calls her R29 funding “untenable”. She says that $70,000 a year “barely covers my salary plus a small amount for equipment, and is not enough to hire anybody else to work with me”.

As a result, says Lingappa, who landed her R29 this year, she is now considering applying for an R01 and giving up the smaller grant. “I certainly wish that [the NIH decision] had been instituted earlier.”

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that those awarded R29s have been handicapped by the perception that they are ‘baby grants’ without the prestige of R01s. David Kupfer, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, says that he used to encourage young scientists to apply for R29s. But he stopped after watching a tenure committee deny a young neuroscientist partly because of the “stigma” of his R29 grant.

But others have had a different experience. George Prendergast, a 36-year-old molecular geneticist at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was recently promoted to associate professor. Since receiving an R29 grant three years ago, he has applied for and received an additional $1.1 million in funding from other organizations for his cancer research laboratory. “It certainly hasn't held us back,” he says.