How Fresh Funding Structures Could Support Research With Impact

Eli Berman, a professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego, does work that many would see as vitally important: He analyzes global trouble spots in the hopes of keeping the country out of wars. But he has struggled to get the money he needs to finance his research.

Yes, that’s a woefully familiar lament these days.

Yet Mr. Berman’s problem is far more fundamental than just a shrinking federal budget: While his work may have broad implications, it’s not clear that any single agency is responsible for supporting it.

That’s because Mr. Berman, research director for international security studies at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, is filling a need that government structures seem not to have anticipated. He flies to war zones, then to meetings with State Department and Pentagon officials, trying to keep them up to date on world crises and scientific insights that might help in dealing with them.

The job, basically, is to “explain to the federal government what to do with the research that they spent money” on, Mr. Berman said. But, he said of his mission, “it’s dark and cold and lonely, because it really falls between the cracks.”

That appears to be an increasingly common problem, not just in national security, but across the research spectrum. Government structures for financing science may make sense for reasons of professional development, economics, and tradition, but they’re not necessarily built for optimal problem-solving.

The National Institutes of Health is the largest provider of basic research money to universities. Like the National Science Foundation and other agencies, it also finances work to convert research findings into real-world uses. At NIH, that translational work includes spending more than $600 million a year on a division devoted primarily to converting lab discoveries into new pharmaceuticals. It spends another $200 million apiece on major new initiatives in neuroscience and individually tailored medicine.

Benefits undoubtedly will flow from such efforts, said Sandro Galea, dean of public health at Boston University. But more valuable, Dr. Galea said, would be structures designed from the start to identify and pursue society’s biggest problems, rather than tackle discipline-based segments of those issues. “When you start asking what matters most, it really changes how you look at things, and it changes what you take on,” he said.

Common Calculations

The interest in government structures comes, in part, because private funders may be little better. Alzheimer’s disease, as one major and growing example, is estimated to cost the nation more than $200 billion a year, making it one of the most expensive chronic diseases. Research so far shows that exercise can help prevent Alzheimer’s better than any known medication. Yet out of about a dozen grant programs offered annually by the Alzheimer’s Association, the largest nonprofit funder of Alzheimer’s research, just one focuses on nonpharmacological strategies.

Meanwhile, some of the most-ambitious research universities have embraced a “grand challenges” format, in which they pick a formidable problem or two and then assemble research teams to tackle them. One of the biggest programs, at the University of California at Los Angeles, aims to make the city fully self-sustainable on energy and water by 2050, and eliminate the burden of depression by 2100.

But even a grand challenge has its limits. While scientific projections suggest that much of the city might be underwater by 2100, climate didn’t show up on UCLA’s list. That’s because UCLA’s two choices reflect not just the importance of the challenges, but also the university’s ability to grow existing research strengths, said Michelle Popowitz, assistant vice chancellor for research and executive director of UCLA Grand Challenges program. “We could see there’s funding in these areas,” she explained.

Those types of calculations are common, said Benjamin G. Bishin, a professor of political science at the University of California at Riverside. “We essentially have a system where problems are prioritized based on economic impact for the people who are going to do the studies,” Mr. Bishin said.

Universities increasingly engage in “cluster hiring,” through which they strategically recruit for select departments with an eye toward revenues and future fund raising, Mr. Bishin said. “The problem is that the foci of those clusters doesn’t come about from a discussion of what are the most pressing social problems. It comes about from how the faculty think we can improve the research profile of the university,” he said. Mr. Bishin cites the opening in 2013 of Riverside’s new medical school — a financial gamble for California’s cash-strapped public-university system, he said, but a clear winner for the campus’s leadership and its credentials as a research hub.

Far too much university research and funding, Dr. Galea said, is dedicated to making increasingly precise tallies for relatively minor issues. Instead of paying researchers to count how many blueberries per day may cut the risk of heart attacks, Dr. Galea said, universities and their funders could more systematically identify and tackle the root causes of social problems — such as tolerance of violent attitudes, indifference to environmental concerns, and large and persistent gaps in wealth, education, and economic opportunity.

‘Picking Winners and Losers’

Some federal support for science does reflect that ambition. Robert C. Bailey, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, gets money from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to promote male circumcision in Kenya as a way of reducing AIDS infections. His team works directly with Kenyan villagers to discuss their concerns on matters including the pain and cost of the process and how it fits with cultural and religious mores. He also tells them about the benefits he sees, such as improved hygiene, protection from disease, and enhanced sexual performance. Mr. Bailey said his team was about halfway to its goal of 23 million circumcisions, which would be expected to spare Kenyans millions of new infections and save them billions of dollars.

The NIH has one division, the Fogarty International Center, that is especially concerned with real-world implementations of research, said its director, Roger I. Glass. Its projects include reducing farm injuries in China, khat addiction in Yemen, and fetal alcohol syndrome in Russia. Putting research into practice is a tough learning process for scholars, Dr. Glass acknowledged. “We know a lot about science here, but we don’t know how to implement the science that we discover,” he said.

Those efforts are rarer for problems within the United States, where NIH’s focus on real-world outcomes is largely a matter of assisting drug development. “Their translational push is much more at the lab bench than it is in society at large,” Rush D. Holt Jr., chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said of NIH.

NIH and other government agencies are acting out of fear of Congress, Mr. Holt said. “If you’re actually trying to take some technology or some social-science finding or some medical-science finding and drive it out there to help people, immediately you’ll be accused of picking winners and losers,” he said. “They’d rather let the market pick the winners and losers, and of course what that means sometimes is some of these technologies don’t get to people who need them, or particularly they don’t get to the neediest of people.”

Perhaps one of the hottest hot-button issues in American society is gun violence. Congress has largely forbidden the NIH and CDC from studying the problem. Those restrictions wouldn’t be such a concern, said Garen J. Wintemute, who researches gun violence at the University of California at Davis, if more government-sponsored science was aimed at larger-scale solutions, such as confronting macho attitudes and promoting mental calm and empathy.

“There are more than 300 million firearms in the U.S., and they’re not going away,” said Dr. Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine. “We need strategies that work with those firearms present.”

Change may be coming. Despite his frustrations in getting national-security research into the hands of policy makers, Mr. Berman said the Pentagon now has one of the government’s better models for making effective use of science because it hires enough experts to give it a significant capability to conduct its own research in-house. “Because they do research, they’re connoisseurs of research,” he said. “They know good research when they see it.”

And the NSF has just embarked on a project that could give a huge boost to putting research in the real world. In 2011 the agency created a program known as the Innovation Corps, which teaches researchers to think like entrepreneurs and create businesses based on their product ideas. The program has since spread to NIH and other federal agencies. And now the NSF has awarded a grant to Angela M. Evans, dean of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, to create a new version of I-Corps for researchers working on public policy and nonprofit endeavors.

Armed with some of the key I-Corps skills — how to define and find customers, for example — university researchers could make real-world implementation a more standard component of their grant-financed work, Ms. Evans said. With time, she said, government support might also help overcome the fact that universities’ tenure-and-promotion systems tend to reward scientific outreach that generates patents and licenses rather than broad social benefit.

“If you prove what you can do, and you prove it makes an impact,” she said, “it would be very hard for people to say it doesn’t matter.”

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.