A less-than-collegial battle between two major research universities in laid-back Southern California says much about the severity of the financial pressures mounting on American higher education.
Among research universities a longstanding gentlemen’s agreement has held that a scientist who moves from one institution to another is allowed to carry any grant support along to his or her new home.
Now, with universities counting every dollar, that bit of protocol may become a quaint courtesy of days gone by.
The dispute broke out last month, when Paul S. Aisen, a professor of neurosciences at the University of California at San Diego and director of its Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study, resigned to join the University of Southern California.
The Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study, known as the ADCS, was financed in 2013 by a five-year, $55-million grant from the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Aisen intended to take the grant with him to USC.
But under NIH rules, grants are awarded to institutions, not individuals. UC-San Diego acknowledges that it is typical for a university to allow the transfer of a researcher’s grants to a new institution. But that courtesy is rarely extended in the case of very large awards involving multiple faculty members, such as center grants, said David A. Brenner, dean of medicine at UC-San Diego.
So this month UC-San Diego sued Dr. Aisen and USC in state court in San Diego. The suit accused the professor of blocking UC-San Diego from gaining computer access to his study’s data, and accused USC of encouraging such behavior by giving Dr. Aisen benefits that include a $500,000 annual salary guaranteed through 2020.
“We are completely baffled” by USC’s actions, Dr. Brenner told The Chronicle. “It is extraordinary for one university to sue another,” Randolph W. Hall, vice president for research at USC, said in response.
NIH Approval Needed
To make its point, USC listed several other instances in which larger center grants from the NIH were peacefully transferred between institutions after a faculty member’s move. UC-San Diego answered by citing a series of ways the Alzheimer’s project differed from the suggested comparisons, including the study’s size — its latest clinical trial is expected to include 1,000 participants — and its 24-year history at San Diego.
UC-San Diego was especially aggrieved by what it regarded as the secretive nature of USC’s recruitment of Dr. Aisen. “USC engaged in months of negotiations with Dr. Aisen as if the ADCS were Dr. Aisen’s personal property, without any attempt to communicate with UC-San Diego in advance,” said Gary S. Firestein, associate vice chancellor and dean of translational medicine at UC-San Diego. USC, in turn, said that it does not seek the entire Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study from UC-San Diego, and would be happy to discuss a resolution without involving the courts.
For now, the study is staying at UC-San Diego. The NIH must approve any transfer of the grant to a new institution, said Vicky Cahan, a spokeswoman for the National Institute on Aging, the NIH division that awarded the grant. The NIH also must approve a replacement when a grant’s lead researcher leaves, and it is now in the process of working on that with UC-San Diego, Ms. Cahan said.
The NIH would like to “ensure that operations of the ADCS network continue as seamlessly as possible,” she said.
On the issue of data rights, Ms. Cahan said she could not comment on the specific case, but reiterated that NIH grant recipients are institutions rather than individuals, and that the recipients generally own the rights to the data.
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.
