On the surface, a gathering held for young research faculty last week at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was a clear expression of determination by the National Institutes of Health to help them compete for grants. The agency fears that continued Congressional budget cuts, combined with the growing number of scientists who work later into life, could drive younger researchers away from academe, leaving university labs dangerously understaffed in coming decades.
As sunshine bathed the seaside lab’s elegantly manicured grounds, some 200 young professors from 90 research universities sat indoors for hours, taking full advantage of the opportunity to probe NIH experts on the fine points of grants with names like R01, R21, and K23.
Tobias Loddenkemper, a 39-year-old assistant professor of neurology at Harvard University, has a new idea for helping epilepsy patients by timing their treatments. His first NIH grant application was rejected, but he left the conference with new strategies for writing his resubmission more clearly.
“It’s wonderful that they are reaching out to young investigators,” he said.
But even as they offered advice to Dr. Loddenkemper and other young researchers, key conference organizers acknowledged that they weren’t sure how far the NIH should go to help.
“There’s no question that NIH is very concerned about the fact of the increasing age of ‘independence’ in science,” said Richard K. Nakamura, acting director of the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review, who led a delegation of about a dozen top agency officials and grant reviewers to the conference.
But what steps NIH should take “is a huge debate” inside the agency, he said. “There are those who feel that beyond a certain point, most investigators become less productive, and therefore we should be splitting up the money more. And then there are others who say science is a meritocracy, it’s best run as a meritocracy, and we should distribute the money based on what is best for science.”
The president of the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, Bruce W. Stillman, was less ambivalent. Mr. Stillman started off the conference by expressing his fear that strategies designed to spread NIH dollars more widely represented “scientific socialism.” The problem, he said, is the almost-uniform expectation among universities that winning a federal grant is an essential condition for gaining tenure.
“There’s a perception that every place in the United States should be able to do research,” Mr. Stillman said afterward in an interview. “And I’m beginning to wonder whether that is a viable situation.” Universities need to figure out broader measures for evaluating faculty that give greater credit to teaching, he said, and federal agencies such as NIH need to ensure that grants are awarded on the basis of merit.
The clearest point of agreement is on the underlying problem: Federally financed research has repeatedly proved its value to almost everyone except members of Congress. A study last year by Battelle Memorial Institute calculated that the $3.8-billion that the U.S. government spent on the Human Genome Project from 1988 to 2003 had already driven $796-billion in economic growth. Almost the entire project was repaid by a single year of taxes from the genomics-enabled industry in 2010, the report said.
Nevertheless, Congress has cut the budget of the National Institutes of Health, the leading supplier of federal money for basic research at U.S. universities, by about 20 percent relative to inflation since 2003.
That’s brought renewed attention to the longstanding fact that older, more experienced, and better-connected scientists have a built-in advantage when seeking their share of the $26-billion in support for external research that the NIH distributes each year.
A total of 375 researchers, mostly those with seniority and experience, now hold more than $5-million apiece in NIH grants. (See related story.) More than two-thirds of the NIH’s main category of research grants are being won by those who have already won another grant. The worry is that such daunting odds for their younger colleagues, at a time of shrinking NIH budgets, could scare off a generation of promising new researchers.
Apprenticeships and Fiefdoms
Dr. Loddenkemper said he’s already seen colleagues quit after failing to win NIH support. They include one of his own collaborators, “a brilliant scientist,” Dr. Loddenkemper said, who now has “a much-better-paid job” with more regular hours working in private industry.
On one level, there’s the question of whether researchers are really harmed by waiting longer to see their own names on an NIH award. The average age at which a researcher wins his first major NIH grant has climbed in recent years to about 42 for those with a PhD and nearly 45 for those with a medical degree. But in many instances, younger researchers are sharing money won by a senior colleague.
Some see that as useful, effectively giving newer researchers an apprenticeship before they seek their first grant. Many big-dollar NIH project grants specifically include set-asides for younger researchers, a point typically missed by agency statistics setting out the experience-related disparities in grant approval rates.
Lawrence Corey, professor of medicine at the University of Washington and president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said a local university-based committee charged with divvying up the tens of millions of dollars in NIH support for the Hutchinson center is in a strong position to identify promising young talent. A grant proposal that reviewers at NIH headquarters might see as risky could look very different locally, Dr. Corey said. The committee might say, “We know this person, it’s bold, and let’s do it,” he said.
For others, that’s not good enough. It’s paternalistic to intentionally create a system where younger researchers rely on senior colleagues to share money with them, said James M. Gentile, president of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, which distributes about $4-million a year in private grant support.
William P. Halford, an associate professor of medical microbiology, immunology, and cell biology at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, who doesn’t have any current NIH grant, agrees. “It’s almost like this medieval idea of fiefdoms,” Mr. Halford said.
The NIH does give some preference to new applicants in its grant-scoring system, typically assigning newer scientists a few extra percentage points when deciding which proposals will get approved. But “they don’t get much of a break,” said Sten H. Vermund, a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University who currently has $48-million in NIH grant money under his name, thanks largely to his role as director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health.
Several years ago, the NIH abolished a major grant program specifically designed for younger researchers, Dr. Vermund said. “And so now young investigators have to compete against me and against Larry Corey, and we’re really experienced grant writers,” he said.
The NIH introduced a rule change this year requiring an additional layer of review for any awards to any principal investigator with existing grants worth at least $1.5-million. It’s part of a plan to ensure that new scientists receive grants at rates equal to those of established researchers, said Sally J. Rockey, the NIH deputy director in charge of extramural research.
That goal was met last year, when the NIH hit a record low grant-approval rate, with both new and experienced researchers winning just 15 percent of their major grant applications.
But only about 30 percent of those winning major NIH research grants last year were first-time applicants, a decline from 32 percent the previous year. And about 20 percent of those who get NIH money receive 50 percent of the total dollars, the agency said in a report last October that reviewed possible additional remedies.
Back to the Classroom?
Additional small-scale steps might include further shortening of NIH grant-application forms. The standard size was recently cut to 12 pages from 25. Advocates include Mr. Gentile, whose foundation uses a two-page application form and contends it lets inexperienced applicants focus on key points. Those wary may include many attendees at the Cold Spring Harbor conference, who repeatedly asked NIH officials for advice on how to cram key details into the tighter space.
More far-reaching steps could include a wholesale revision of federal research financing with an eye toward helping universities and their professors spend more time teaching and less pursuing grants.
The NIH’s primary mission centers on improving health by financing research, Mr. Nakamura said. But the NIH also pursues strategies to improve teaching, and the agency is realizing that universities’ dual missions of teaching and research are increasingly coming into conflict, he said.
“I think we all agree that some time should be left for scientists to be in the classroom,” Mr. Nakamura said. “But who should strike that balance, and how that should be done, has not been completely established.”
For researchers such as Raphael J. Landovitz, an assistant professor of medicine at University of California at Los Angeles, the questions are more immediate. Dr. Landovitz, at age 41, said he has never had his own NIH grant and has been content to help lead a large NIH-financed multisite study of AIDS treatments led by a Harvard professor of medicine, Daniel R. Kuritzkes. But recently, Dr. Landovitz said, he submitted a grant proposal asking the NIH to finance a new strategy for HIV prevention.
A decision on the application is expected in May, and the result will shape Dr. Landovitz’s opinion about whether the NIH needs to do more to help younger researchers. Once the NIH responds, he said, “I’ll let you know if I think the field needs to be tilted.”
