As the federal government veers toward a possible shutdown this week, Republican lawmakers may have found some unexpected support for their quest to cut money for academic research: university researchers.
At a science-policy forum assembled last week by Arizona State University, three prominent university researchers expressed varying degrees of support for the proposition that the quality of federally financed research might improve if there was less of it.
“The more you spend, the less you think,” said one of the researchers, Paul Davies, a college professor and theoretical physicist at Arizona State.
He and other researchers were joined in their critiques by Arizona State’s president, Michael M. Crow, who wrote an article appearing in the current edition of the journal Nature that calls for “a radical restructure” of the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading provider of research money to universities.
U.S. taxpayers spend more than $30-billion a year through the NIH, with more than half going to universities. But that much spending isn’t giving Americans a corresponding increase in their overall quality of health, said Mr. Crow, who played host to the annual policy discussion here at the Penn Club. That’s due in large part to “outmoded beliefs” at the NIH about how best to organize its pursuit of meaningful science, Mr. Crow wrote in Nature.
Researchers at the science forum expressed caution toward endorsing actual cuts, especially on the scale advocated by some Congressional Republicans. But they questioned whether taxpayers were getting full value from the $25-billion the federal government spends each year on university-based research, and talked of possible benefits from occasionally forcing scientists to compete for fewer dollars.
Freeman J. Dyson, a renowned theorist and retired professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, said large-scale research projects seem especially wasteful. Martha J. Farah, a professor of natural sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said cutting federal spending on science might have some benefit, but only if agencies such as the NIH had better systems for ensuring the best projects win approval.
“Theoretically, if we could perfectly prioritize science, in terms of what’s long-term going to be the most advantageous, then what these guys were saying makes some sense,” Ms. Farah said, referring to Mr. Davies and Mr. Dyson.
A Politically Charged Climate
The suggestions come at a politically vulnerable time for university researchers. Some Republican lawmakers are demanding $61-billion in cuts from the current year’s $3.8-trillion federal budget, and Congress may allow the government to shut down if it cannot reach an agreement by Friday. The Republicans have called for cuts of as much as $1.63-billion, or nearly 5.4 percent, from the NIH, and $359.5-million, or 5.2 percent, from the National Science Foundation.
By and large, universities are aggressively fighting the proposed cuts. Just two days after the event here, a group of eight university presidents and chancellors met with six U.S. senators at the Capitol to emphasize the importance of federally financed university research to local economies.
The relationship has “been arguably the most successful investing partnership in the world,” Samuel L. Stanley Jr., president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said in a statement after the meeting.
Critics can justifiably criticize aspects of federal spending on science, said Patrick J. Clemins, director of the budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But calls for cuts right now could be dangerously counterproductive, Mr. Clemins said.
“Congress is looking for reasons to back up these cuts,” he said. “There is potential for them to look at these comments made and take them out of context, for sure.”
Dissatisfaction with governmental spending practices is common within higher education. Researchers and administrators, however, typically stop short of suggesting possible benefits in reduced federal support.
The departing president of the Association of American Universities, Robert M. Berdahl, suggested in 2009 that the nation may need “fewer but better” research universities. The editor in chief of the journal Science, Bruce Alberts, wrote an editorial last year saying the NIH had created a system of perverse incentives that encourage U.S. universities to “to expand their research capacities indefinitely.” Their organizations, however, both advocate overall increases in federal spending on science.
Applicants for federal grant money currently have success rates of around 10 percent, leaving many worthwhile projects languishing for a lack of financial support, Mr. Clemins said. “The less funding there is,” added Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the AAU, “the more conservative researchers become, as they are convinced that only the most surefire research will get funded.”
‘Serendipity in Science’
Mr. Davies said he certainly welcomes more support for quality science. “But just throwing money at a problem is often counterproductive,” he said. “What you find, if you look back at the history of science, is major targeted research programs that have very large amounts of funding tend to return very little per dollar, and you often find that big breakthroughs come from somewhat impoverished programs.”
A British national, Mr. Davies cites with admiration examples such as Jocelyn Bell, who made her groundbreaking discovery of pulsars in 1967 using a radio telescope fashioned from chicken wire in a field outside Cambridge, England. Too much federally financed research in the United States requires researchers to lock in their ideas for years at a time, while writing extensive formal reports describing their progress, he said.
“It really doesn’t allow researchers to wake up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea and think, ‘Yeah, let’s forget what we were doing yesterday—there’s a great opportunity to go down this path,’” he said.
Mr. Dyson, now 87, said he’s advocated reduced governmental spending in the past, saying, “Cut the research budget and see better science.” He said he doesn’t endorse that extreme step now, but he still sees too many instances in which large projects are wasting money that could be spent on smaller grants and on “unfashionable fields” with a much greater likelihood of a meaningful breakthrough. Private donors often do a much better job of supporting science without excessive red tape, he said.
Ms. Farah said that reducing funding might cull bad scientists, but she said the problem with such a step now is that the NIH and other agencies don’t have a reliable system for determining the worst 10 percent of the projects it supports. “The worst thing in the world is to have less money and peer review that people don’t have faith in,” she said.
Mr. Crow suggested in his article that the NIH, now divided into 27 units based largely on individual types of diseases, could do better by realigning itself into three institutes focusing on biomedical-systems research, health outcomes, and sustainable-cost models. “Such a change would reflect today’s scientific culture, which is moving toward convergence,” he wrote, “especially in the life sciences, where collaboration across disciplines is becoming the norm.”
NIH officials acknowledged they need to keep improving the ability of researchers to work and collaborate without unnecessary interference and obstacles. Sally J. Rockey, the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, said a survey by the Federal Demonstration Partnership—a coalition of federal agencies and universities—found that scientists report spending more than 40 percent of their time on administrative issues involving grants.
“That is an extraordinary amount of time,” Ms. Rockey said, “and we do try to do everything we can to try to reduce the burden on both scientists and on the institutions.”
And critics may be overstating the problem, she said. Most NIH support is provided through grants, rather than contracts, allowing scientists to work without any requirement of “specific deliverables,” Ms. Rockey said. “We still have expectations that a person will pursue the objectives that they propose,” she said. “But there is this flexibility in here to allow for serendipity in science.”
The NIH also has its Pioneer Awards program to provide the less-structured support to accomplished scientists that Mr. Davies and Mr. Dyson advocate, Ms. Rockey said. The Pioneer Awards program is only a few years old, and its budget is still much smaller than that of NIH’s traditional grant programs, though that could change, said Kathy L. Hudson, NIH deputy director for science, outreach, and policy.
“It’s probably getting close to time to evaluate that and see what produces the more innovative high-impact science,” Ms. Hudson said. And over all, the NIH and other federal agencies will team up in an effort called Star Metrics to carry out comprehensive analyses of the benefits of government investments in science. Mr. Davies said a reduction in resources brings about its own discipline. “If you’ve got a limited budget, you’ve really got to sit down and think very carefully about what you’re going to do and what you can achieve on a shoestring,” he said.
