Sean J. Morrison, professor of pediatrics: $10 million. James P. Allison, professor of immunology: $10 million. Nancy A. Jenkins and Neal G. Copeland, deans of cancer biology and genetics: $7.5 million each.
Such are the hefty recruiting packages that lured four researchers — along with their labs and staffs — to Texas. They’ve joined 80 other leading cancer researchers who have moved to Texas’ universities and institutes over the past five years thanks to a $250-million state-aided spending spree on science superstars.
It’s part of a strategy to make Texas a clear leader in studying cancer — to attack one of humanity’s most devastating diseases and, hopefully, to bolster the state’s economy in the process. Key goals include creating jobs and raising the quality of Texas’ research universities, said Wayne R. Roberts, chief executive officer of the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas, a state-chartered agency known as Cprit.
“Overarching it all,” Mr. Roberts said of his agency and its mission, “is to cure and to find ways to mitigate cancer.”
At a time when American research universities face growing financial pressure, driven largely by cuts in federal and state financing, Texas stands as something of an anomaly — and, perhaps, a role model. By laying out millions of dollars to lure premier cancer scientists from other universities across the country, the state is drawing criticism and skepticism as well as envy and emulation.
Some embrace the practice as recruiting; others deride it as poaching. Either way, it’s a tactic pretty much as old as universities themselves. The centuries-old quest to accumulate the most celebrated scientific minds has always come with benefits both financial and emotional.
But in more recent years, the economic value of the strategy has moved to the fore. Beyond Texas, several states have made an explicit practice of figuring out which fields of scientific research are most important to their economic futures, and then giving their universities money to go out and hire established scholars, and rising stars, in those fields.
“What is new” about poaching, said C. Michael Cassidy, president and chief executive officer of the Georgia Research Alliance, which distributes about $16 million a year in state money, “is doing it as a broad economic-development strategy.”
With that approach come some new stresses for universities. The University of California at San Diego sued the University of Southern California this month over its recruitment of a leading researcher of Alzheimer’s disease. And Carnegie Mellon University saw a budding business partnership go sour this year when Uber Technologies Inc. instead hired away 40 of Carnegie’s researchers and scientists.
The climate has become so disorienting that complaints and compliments about academic poaching can sometimes be heard from the same corners. In New York, for example, the state’s medical schools have grumbled publicly about Texas’ behavior. At the same time, they are urging their own Legislature to try a similar plan.
A ‘Bolus of Support’
States such as Texas that offer recruitment money “aren’t necessarily investing in new people,” said Jo Wiederhorn, president and chief executive officer of the Associated Medical Schools of New York, a consortium of the state’s 16 public and private medical schools. “They’re just stealing from other states.”
Yet, Ms. Wiederhorn hastened to add, they’re doing so within legal and ethical bounds. “If a state has enough foresight to see that this is going to be the new economy and they can strengthen their economy through doing this,” she said, “then there’s nothing untoward about it.”
From 2002 to 2009, New York State tried its own hand at aggressive academic recruiting: Its Faculty Development Program spent more than $35 million helping medical schools attract and retain researchers. That’s on top of the $300 million dished out since 2007 by the state’s stem-cell science initiative, second in size only to California’s $3-billion effort in the field.
But that kind of money has largely dried up in recent years, and Ms. Wiederhorn and leaders of the state’s medical schools have been pressing lawmakers in Albany for more. The main proposal would provide $50 million a year for faculty recruitment, to be matched by at least $100 million from the medical schools.
“It’s really designed, we believe, to level the playing field for New York medical schools,” Lee Goldman, dean of medicine at Columbia University, said of the lobbying campaign.
Texas’ commitment to recruitment has certainly changed cancer research. Bolstered by its oil-industry wealth, Texas set aside $3 billion over 10 years for the cancer agency beginning in 2007. The disease made for a politically popular target at a time of cuts in cancer spending at the federal level, especially with the Texas native Lance Armstrong, then a cycling star, leading public appeals.
To a large degree, it has worked, as evidenced by the movement of so many high-profile scientists to Texas institutions, which must cover at least half the cost of the recruitment packages. Total packages typically run from about $2 million for a junior researcher up to $10 million for established stars like Mr. Morrison and Mr. Allison.
Mr. Morrison, a professor of pediatrics who left the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2011 to join the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said the money had let him significantly expand his work, including the creation of a clinical trial for melanoma. “These are things that wouldn’t have happened, period, anywhere, in the absence of that bolus of support from Cprit,” he said.
The Search for Superstars
California, which made its $3-billion commitment in 2004, also limited its program to a specific field. It chose stem-cell research, seeing that as a promising avenue of medical investigation that was then largely being blocked at the federal level. Other states, however, work with much more modest sums of money, and with correspondingly tighter focuses.
An example is Utah, one of several states using Georgia’s 25-year-old program as a model. Rather than try to compete broadly with Texas for cancer researchers, the Utah Science Technology and Research project has sought to place world leaders in eight specific niches, such as identifying the proteins associated with cancer of the liver, at its two major research universities.
“I can’t win the fight to be the best in cancer, for God’s sake,” said Ted McAleer, a former executive director of the agency, which has an annual budget of about $20 million. “I’ve got to pick an element of cancer that we can be the best at.”
Beyond their choices of academic specialties, states face other strategic questions: Should they emphasize the construction of lab facilities or the recruitment of scientists to fill them? Should they concentrate on promising young talent or established stars? Is it wiser to pursue economic growth through the academic grass roots or through existing companies and industries?
Utah chose to emphasize facility construction — $200 million went to new buildings at the University of Utah and Utah State — before recruiting mostly younger researchers. Florida, Massachusetts, and Virginia are trying to help their universities recruit more senior out-of-state researchers. Arizona has a decade-old strategy for broadly building its biosciences industry that more heavily emphasizes attracting companies and cultivating entrepreneurs.
The Texas institute has incorporated all of those strategies. But halfway through its planned 10-year run, the agency is under political pressure due to concerns that some of the agency’s money is being mismanaged and that the broader public mission is being sidetracked by parochial commercial interests.
Against that backdrop, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation last month allocating $40 million more to help public universities poach top talent from out-of-state research institutions across all academic fields.
Ironically, that matches advice that Texas just received from New York. During a recent visit to the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the vice dean of science at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, Dafna Bar-Sagi, heard concerns that the state’s $3-billion fund wasn’t proving to be generous enough for some coveted scientists.
“It’s not very easy for them to recruit,” said Ms. Bar-Sagi, a professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at NYU, “because people still need to move and live in Texas.” Ms. Bar-Sagi said she had told her Texas hosts they might overcome researchers’ reluctance to move there by hiring a few superstars whose presence could then lure others.
That suggestion points to a criticism of Texas’ poaching efforts: Millions of recruiting dollars have given the state’s medical schools “very few key thought leaders and a lot of average investigators,” as David A. Brenner, dean of medicine at UC-San Diego, put it.
A desirable locale has certainly worked for New York City, Ms. Bar-Sagi said. For a long time, she said, researchers — like many other people — feared the city as unsafe. But with a drop in crime and a boom in big gifts to universities from wealthy New Yorkers, the city is now in a “golden age,” she said, that makes researchers eager to come.
‘Likely to Lose’
Ultimately, the greatest inequity in recruiting might come not from variation among states’ recruiting budgets — which in many states benefit both public and private institutions — but from the underlying gap in wealth between the publics and the privates. One public institution in the State University of New York system, Stony Brook University, received $6 million from the state’s Faculty Development Program to hire eight researchers, which led to six start-up companies, 21 patents, and $39 million in federal grant awards, Ms. Wiederhorn’s association told state lawmakers in 2012.
Now, with that state fund’s having expired, Stony Brook is struggling to recruit, said Ms. Bar-Sagi, who left the Long Island institution in 2006 to join NYU. “If you have someone who is very good at a state university,” she said, “you’re likely to lose this individual.”
Convincing lawmakers that that’s a problem, however, can be a tough sell. Hard data on the effectiveness of researcher recruitment is elusive. New York colleges have produced an analysis finding that every $1 of spending on research produces $7.50 of economic benefit. The Georgia agency has calculated the ratio at about five to one, with $600 million in state funds leading to $2.6 billion in federal and private investment.
The longer-term benefits of recruiting star scientists may be even larger, once gains in student quality, institutional reputation, and other categories are factored in. But state lawmakers typically want hard short-term numbers, said Jennifer K. Ozawa, associate director of technology-based economics at SRI International, which advises states on their recruitment programs. That often leads to program budgets tied to the “easiest to measure” yardsticks, such as federal research grants, patents, and new companies, she said.
States also have trouble with the nuts and bolts of executing a recruitment strategy, she said. Many try to define for universities how much money new researchers should bring in, how closely they should work with industry, and how commercially oriented their work should be. “The big picture is one thing, but getting the details is something else,” Ms. Ozawa said.
Beyond New York, some campus officials on the losing end of the recruitment game are remarkably stoic. The departure of a star researcher can hurt, but it isn’t the end of the world, said James O. Woolliscroft, dean of medicine at the University of Michigan, which lost Mr. Morrison to Texas. The academic world is very small, Dr. Woolliscroft said, and many if not most departing scientists continue to have relationships with Michigan after they leave. He cited examples such as the current director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis S. Collins, who maintains strong ties to Michigan two decades after he left.
The University of Colorado at Boulder has it especially bad. It’s one of the country’s worst-supported public institutions, getting about $60 million from the state for its $1.4-billion annual campus budget. In a typical year, its provost, Russell L. Moore, has several dozen faculty members receive out-of-state recruitment offers.
Still, Colorado manages to compete for young talent because of its reputation in areas such aerospace and geosciences, and because of a cooperative faculty ethos that encourages sharing big-dollar equipment, Mr. Moore said.
“As bothersome as it can get sometimes,” he said of the pressure from outside recruiters, “I’d hate to say we’re all going to stand down, because then I’m afraid that wouldn’t provide incentive for our best scholars to do what they do.”
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.
