The cash-strapped National Institutes of Health is considering potentially major changes in its grant-awards system, including greater reliance on a system that evaluates researchers rather than their proposals.
Addressing his advisory committee this month, the agency’s director, Francis S. Collins, said that a decade of experience with the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Program has proved the success of such an approach, and that it’s time to consider expanding it.
Dr. Collins said the approach seemed even more necessary now, at a time of federal budget cuts, to keep financing the “superstars” of science who now face the potential loss of grant money.
“You don’t want to force them,” he said, referring to top academic scientists, “into a space of having to define a very precisely narrow project in order to make it through peer review. You want to have a means to encourage them to spread their wings.”
For most NIH grant awards, applicants propose projects designed to answer specific questions, and a proposal’s value is judged by a peer-review panel of subject experts. For the Pioneer Award, begun in 2004, applicants suggest broad approaches to a research question, and the review emphasizes the person’s potential to succeed. Pioneer Awards provide up to $500,000 a year for five years. The standard NIH grant is worth closer to $200,000 over three to five years.
But the NIH, with an annual budget of about $30-billion a year, makes only seven Pioneer Award grants a year. At a meeting in January with directors of the NIH’s 27 institutes, Dr. Collins said he planned to push for more. He did not specify what percentage of NIH grants might use the new model.
Hughes Institute as Model
Dr. Collins repeatedly cited the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private provider of health-research money, as an example of the model he wants. The Hughes institute gives awards to highly rated researchers without requiring that specific projects be identified in advance.
The NIH commissioned a private study of Pioneer Award recipients by the Institute for Defense Analyses, which reported last year that their level of innovation and impact was similar to that of Hughes awardees, and greater than that of investigators with standard NIH grants.
Advocates of the NIH’s making greater use of the Hughes approach include John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and health research and policy at Stanford University, who has said it would save both the NIH and university researchers large amounts of the time and money that go into the peer-review process.
But caution is necessary, said Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who contends the “people, not projects” aspect isn’t the chief reason for the success of the Hughes model.
Other factors that are more important, he said, include the lengthy time horizon of a Hughes award, which typically consists of an initial term and a renewal lasting a total of 10 years.
He also challenged the NIH over its assessment of the Pioneer Award, saying the program, like many well-meaning innovations at the NIH, was not designed to allow for easy assessment of its usefulness. For example, he said, applications are not scored individually in a way that permits an outside evaluation.
Also, Mr. Azoulay said, a private organization like the Hughes institute doesn’t have to publicly defend its decisions. If the NIH puts a greater emphasis on selecting people rather than their projects, then allegations of racial or gender biases could be far more difficult to defend, he said.
‘Terminal Grant’ Idea
The suggested change could also worsen the problem—repeatedly bemoaned by NIH leaders, especially during tight budgetary times—of the rise in the average age at which researchers win their first NIH grants, said Jeremy M. Berg, an associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning at the University of Pittsburgh, who was formerly head of an NIH division.
Dr. Collins and members of his advisory committee, a panel of outside experts mostly from universities, reiterated that concern this month. Shirley M. Tilghman, a panel member who is a molecular biologist and a former president of Princeton University, said one way to clear NIH resources for younger researchers would be a grant that would pay senior researchers to wind down their labs and distribute their resources to others in return for a commitment to seek no more NIH money.
She referred to it as a “terminal grant,” conceding that a different name would probably be necessary to make it more palatable.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a similar program, in which it phases out recipients over a five-year period. The program is too new for a deep analysis, though it appears well received by scientists, said Robert T. Tjian, president of Hughes. It’s “a graceful and productive way for scientists to plan their future involvement in research and teaching as they approach the end of a natural cycle in a scientific life,” said Mr. Tjian, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Panel members also pressed Dr. Collins over the NIH’s policy restricting the resubmission of failed grant applications. Allowing just a single revision, they said, works against small laboratories that can’t easily compile data for an entirely new application. But Dr. Collins held firm, saying the policy was intended to make the NIH grant process more efficient by weeding out repetitive reviews.
