Just last week, at a budget hearing on Capitol Hill, a member of Congress cited a well-traveled number: $2.21.
That figure, said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee in charge of education issues, is how much the National Institutes of Health generates in economic growth for every taxpayer dollar it receives.
“That is an over-100-percent return on the investment,” Ms. DeLauro assured her legislative colleagues. Others, including the NIH’s director, Francis S. Collins, the hearing’s lead witness, have been citing the $2.21 figure for years.
Yet researchers studying the question remain in profound disagreement. They’ve been working on the assumption that the true economic value of the nation’s scientific investment, through the NIH and other agencies, is almost surely a lot higher than $2.21 per dollar. Putting real precision on that number, however, has proved a highly elusive goal.
But this week, after five years of trying, a team of analysts announced progress toward solving the puzzle. The group, led by Julia I. Lane, a former National Science Foundation official, published an article on Thursday in Science magazine offering a series of seemingly random findings on the economics of federal spending on science. They include the fact that faculty researchers account for fewer than one in five workers supported by federal science spending, and that universities given federal research money spend about 70 percent of it outside their home states.
The most important value of such information, Ms. Lane said in an interview, still remains several years away. That’s because this week’s data only capture the first step in the life of a federal research dollar, she said. Much more now needs to be done to keep tracing those dollars in a scientifically rigorous manner throughout the economy, she said, to get a firm idea of what benefit the money ultimately brings.
‘Magic-Multiplier Stuff’
The calculation will be far different from the estimates that produced the $2.21 figure, which merely use a standard economic multiplier to measure the immediate stimulative effect of NIH spending on a local economy—in activities such as workers buying lunch at a nearby restaurant—that would apply to any kind of government spending, whether for medical research or road construction.
A major barrier to getting a better number for science has been that the full effects on society of research discoveries often can take decades to be realized. For too long, Ms. Lane said, the scientific community has taken that complexity as an excuse not to try.
The current attempt to establish economic value stems from the federal stimulus measure of 2009, which led to a project known as Star Metrics. Through it, more than 100 universities agreed to electronically collate data related to their federal grant spending, so that researchers can now automatically collect details such as new jobs, journal publications, and patents associated with each grant.
“It’s going beyond this mechanical magic-multiplier stuff,” said Ms. Lane, currently a senior economist at the American Institutes for Research.
Ms. Lane declined to predict what would eventually prove to be the average benefit of a federal dollar spent on science. The $2.21 figure may be too low, but a multiplier such as 209—the Battelle Memorial Institute’s 2011 estimate of $796-billion in economic growth attributable to the government’s $3.8-billion investment in the Human Genome Project—is clearly too large, she said. Battelle’s study, while also touted by Dr. Collins, the genome project’s leader, gave it far too much credit for a wide range of human genome-related activity, Ms. Lane said.
It’s time, Ms. Lane said, for federal policy toward science to be as grounded in hard data as is policy on a range of other subjects, including health care and taxes. “‘Trust me, send more money,’” she said, “isn’t going to work” any longer for scientists hoping to get more resources from Congress.
