After years of talking about the need to help younger scientists, budget stresses may be finally forcing the National Institutes of Health to do more about it.
As part of its budget plan for the 2013 fiscal year, the NIH is taking steps designed to make it tougher for older and more experienced medical researchers to keep their current share of the agency’s $31-billion budget.
Chief among the changes is a policy that will create additional reviews for researchers already handling at least $1.5-million in NIH grant support. The NIH also is cutting existing grants by 1 percent and ending inflation-based increases for most grants.
“This is all just symptomatic of the fact there’s just no easy choices anymore,” said Jennifer L. Zeitzer, director of legislative relations at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. “They cut the fat out of the NIH budget years ago, then they cut through the muscle, and now you’re at the bone.”
That’s true governmentwide after last year’s showdown between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans who have demanded an end to federal budget deficits, and especially true for the NIH, which has seen its budget grow at or below inflation for the past decade.
Making his annual budget recommendation to Congress on Monday, President Obama proposed a 1.5-percent increase in federal spending on basic scientific research, well above the governmentwide average increase of 0.2 percent. But he proposed that the NIH get $30.7-billion in 2013, the same as its current-year budget.
The flat NIH budget might be a strategy to force Republicans to confront popular support for medical science, said Ms. Zeitzer, whose group is the nation’s largest coalition of biomedical researchers.
But in meetings Tuesday on Capitol Hill, congressional Democrats told lobbyists they would need Republican support if they expected any significant gain in the NIH budget, Ms. Zeitzer said.
Young Researchers Face Challenges
The tough budget news follows years of fretting by NIH officials and university leaders over a growing trend in which younger medical researchers have had an increasingly difficult time getting the federal grants necessary to kick-start their careers.
In 1980, about 18 percent of principal investigators with an NIH grant were age 36 or younger, and fewer than 1 percent were over age 65, the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, Sally J. Rockey, said in a report this week. But now the younger group has shrunk to about 3 percent and the older group accounts for nearly 7 percent, Ms. Rockey said.
The trend was evident five years ago, she said, when she compiled similar data. At the time, Ms. Rockey said, the trend seemed likely to diminish. “However, obviously, I was wrong,” she wrote in a blog entry on the NIH Web site.
The NIH hasn’t put out details of how it will toughen the procedures for researchers with existing grants. The NIH has, however, had a similar policy in effect at one of its divisions, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Ms. Zeitzer said.
“The NIH has been trying for years to figure out ways to better support younger researchers,” she said. “And I think they’re trying to figure out what’s really working and what’s not, so some of these policies and procedures that they’re implementing through the budget are giving them a chance to continue to test that out.”
Yet while the NIH tries to help younger medical students get research grants, other aspects of the Obama administration’s budget might hurt them in getting training and finding jobs in clinical settings.
One of the most harmful provisions in the Obama budget might be the proposal for a 10-percent cut—amounting to about $9-billion over 10 years—to Medicare’s system of “indirect medical education” payments, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Those payments are a subsidy designed to cover the higher costs typically incurred at teaching hospitals due to the presence of such facilities as neonatal-intensive-care units and burn units, said David B. Moore, senior director for government relations at the medical-college association. The additional Medicare benefit is tied to the number of medical residents in a hospital, Mr. Moore said.
The proposed reduction would come on top of other planned cutbacks in government reimbursement to hospitals, Mr. Moore said. “In combination, these could have a pretty significant impact on the ability of institutions” to train new doctors, he said.
Worries Diminished Over New Center
At least one widespread fear among university doctors appears to have diminished in the past year. A year ago, leaders of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology described its members as highly concerned about an NIH plan to create a new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Federation leaders said they backed the basic goal of creating a new NIH division to promote the commercial use of university-research discoveries, but feared the loss of important NIH support from the agency reorganization necessary to accommodate it.
A year later, those fears appear to have largely evaporated, said the federation’s president, Joseph C. LaManna, a professor of physiology and biophysics, neurology, and neuroscience at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, in Cleveland.
Some programs at NIH have been moved around, but the reorganization has been accomplished with very little impact on universities or their researchers, Mr. LaManna said. “We were reassured as it went along that these things would be taken care of,” he said, “and it turned out they were.”
