For four straight years recently, despite annual budget cutbacks, the National Institutes of Health managed to record steady gains in a critical measure: the share of its main grant awards won by new scientists.
Through a combination of new award programs and tweaks to existing policies, the agency fought to protect the young scientists it considered crucial to the long-term success of the nation’s biomedical enterprise.
But that four-year rise ended in 2010, and in the four years since then the percentage of grants won by new researchers has flattened out. And once again the NIH is left scrambling to figure out new approaches to avert what it fears could be a hollowing out of the nation’s medical-research capabilities.
“We’ve done a whole lot of things” to help younger scientists get their first full-scale NIH grant, said Sally J. Rockey, the deputy NIH director in charge of extramural research. With the problem persisting, however, “now we’re thinking about other ways to reduce that age to independence,” she said.
The agency is certainly facing pressure on that front. Just last week Ronald J. Daniels, president of the Johns Hopkins University, higher education’s leading recipient of NIH grant support, sounded an alarm in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mr. Daniels said he had grown increasingly worried by the number of graduate students who were quitting academic research out of fear that it would not be a sustainable career. “Given the extraordinary promise of some of these young men and women, that represents an extraordinary loss to this country,” he said in an interview.
He cited examples such as Zev A. Binder, a former postdoctoral fellow in neurosurgery at Hopkins who earned recognition for his work on hard-to-treat brain tumors. Dr. Binder had hoped to have an academic career, but after an exasperating experience pursuing NIH grant support, he gave up last year and took a job with a private company.
Dr. Binder described the postdoc portion of his career as “being an indentured servant,” given the low pay and years of expected service before winning a faculty post. He and his wife, who was also studying oncology at Hopkins, already had one child, he said in an interview with The Chronicle. “We were expecting our second, and I could not continue on a postdoc’s salary. Barring winning the lottery, it just was not going to cut it.”
Meager Budgets
NIH officials recognize that widespread plight, but are increasingly hamstrung. Congress roughly doubled the NIH’s budget from about 1998 to 2003. But in every year since, it has given the agency annual increases below the rate of inflation.
NIH leaders, worried that younger researchers would have the hardest time surviving the lean years, offered them special help. Beginning in 2007, some NIH divisions set aside an extra share of their R01 grant money—the main category of award for university researchers—to help first-time applicants. Other divisions gave new applicants extra weight in their review scores.
It worked: The share of first-time researchers winning an R01 grant, which had hovered below 25 percent for more than a decade, jumped to 32 percent by 2010. Since then, however, the success rate of first-time researchers has slid back. In each of the last three years, it has held at 27 percent. That has set the NIH off to try a new set of remedies.
In 2010 it announced the Early Independence Award, giving up to 10 young researchers enough money to move straight from completing their doctorates to running their own laboratories. In 2012 it offered the Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training program, designed to help graduate and postdoctoral students move into research careers outside academe.
In 2013 the NIH reduced the eligibility period for its K99 award for postdoctoral students, hoping to entice universities into hiring the students as faculty members rather than relying on them as relatively low-cost labor. The agency also has increased its salary rates for postdoctoral students, and has required that its graduate and postdoctoral students draft formal statements of career goals.
Those steps are welcome, Mr. Daniels said, but they’re not enough. “The situation is sufficiently dire that it demands a level of ongoing vigilance and experimentation,” he said.
In his article, Mr. Daniels offered at least a dozen suggestions, many of which reflect versions of the steps already being taken or evaluated by the NIH. For example, the agency announced last month that it was considering the creation of what Mr. Daniels described as an “orderly conclusion” grant for senior investigators—an award that would allow them to keep their labs for the final years of their careers without competing against younger scientists for a new R01.
Mr. Daniels included some suggestions for universities themselves, such as relaxing the institutional expectation that obtaining an R01 should be a chief requirement for earning a faculty promotion. Yet he conceded that Hopkins itself was still struggling with what additional steps it should take to help postdoctoral students with their careers. And he said he did not have any data showing whether Hopkins was any better than other universities at transitioning its postdoctoral students into research careers.
Trade-Offs and Unknowns
Even with a clear goal of trying to help younger researchers, there are many trade-offs to consider, Ms. Rockey said. Over the past four years, the NIH has made a conscious decision to try to even out grant-application success rates between new and established scientists, she said. That’s a main reason that the share of R01 awards won by new scientists has declined.
That policy adjustment, she said, points to a key fact: Neither the NIH nor universities know the ideal proportions of new and experienced scientists in the nation’s overall medical-research enterprise.
Even the yardstick of “new” researchers may be misleading, Ms. Rockey said. Despite the increased rate of success among new scientists from 2007 to 2010, the average age at which researchers are winning their first R01 grant has remained at 42. “And that’s where we’ve been stuck,” she said.
After a couple years of trying, Dr. Binder did eventually win an NIH grant, in October 2013, but only a fellowship stipend that covered some salary and tuition. He then graduated from his doctoral program the following March, making him no longer eligible for most of the money.
So far, however, he said that his corporate job, as a researcher at Champions Oncology, is giving him more scientific freedom than he imagined. So while he misses the teaching aspects of an academic career, he said he realizes that there’s only so much room in the faculty ranks, and that the private-sector option may not be as limiting as many in academe might suspect.
“I hesitate to counter an opinion from someone, like President Daniels, who has a lot more experience and a larger view than I have,” Dr. Binder said. “It’s an issue,” he said of the problems younger researchers face in winning NIH grants. From outside of academe, however, “I don’t see it as big of an issue, perhaps, as President Daniels portrayed it.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
