Leaders of the National Institutes of Health spoke in despairing terms on Thursday about its ability to prevent severe damage to university research, saying Congress seemed determined to inflict more financial pain on the NIH and the scientists it supports.
The numbers and prognosis are “quite disheartening,” the NIH’s director, Francis S. Collins, told a semiannual meeting of his advisory committee, in Bethesda, Md.
The NIH, with an annual budget of about $31-billion, already is losing $1.55-billion in the current fiscal year from the automatic governmentwide budget cuts, known as sequestration, that took effect in March, Dr. Collins said. That’s forced the NIH to withhold about 700 grants it planned to issue, and to cut the value of awarded grants by an average of 4.7 percent, agency officials said.
But the situation may get far worse, Dr. Collins said. The House of Representatives, in a bid to further trim federal spending, has proposed keeping the 5-percent cut from sequestration and slashing an additional 18.5 percent in its budget plan for the 2014 fiscal year, he said.
And, politically, such deep cuts do not seem impossible on Capitol Hill, Patrick White, the NIH’s legislative-affairs director, told the advisory panel. The sequestration cuts do not seem likely to be reversed, Mr. White said, because leaders of both parties seem confident of their ability to blame the other for any damage.
“So prospects for a grand deal, even though we hope for that, seem quite problematic at this point,” he told the advisory committee, a group of 18 biomedical experts, many of them prominent university leaders.
A Cascade of Financial Problems
Members of the panel pleaded for ideas on how they could make clearer to the public and to Congress their understanding that government spending on biomedical research produces net benefits for the country.
A leading example of those benefits is the Human Genome Project, which cost the federal government about $4-billion in the 1990s. An updated economic assessment of the project, issued on Wednesday by the Battelle Memorial Institute, found that the American economy realized a 65-to-1 gain from every taxpayer dollar spent on the federal effort to sequence the human genome.
Losses from NIH budget cuts will include both medical breakthroughs that will go undiscovered and young researchers who will get discouraged and find other careers, Dr. Collins told the panel. A Twitter message from Dr. Collins on May 7, asking scientists to provide specific examples, has already attracted more than 2,000 responses, many of them “heartbreaking” instances of university researchers worried about their future, he said.
Answering the panel’s call for strategies on how to help, Mr. White suggested drawing public attention to people such as Dina A. Faddah, a graduate student in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who previously worked with Dr. Collins in his NIH lab. Ms. Faddah is due to complete her doctoral program in the spring, and then decide where to turn.
Federal budget cuts haven’t yet affected her, Ms. Faddah said in an interview, but they are causing her great concern as she faces a turning point in her career. The possibility that budget cuts will cause a cascade of financial problems throughout the research community is “very scary as a student,” she said.
One example she cited involves a top researcher in her lab, a Chinese national who has already decided to return home rather than risk trying to establish a lab in the United States. “That’s where the U.S. is going to lose some edge, is that people go back to their home countries,” she said.
Dr. Collins drew a similar conclusion about the effects of federal spending priorities. At a recent meeting of his counterparts in other countries, he said, he listened as many of them described plans for large increases in spending on medical research. They included, he said, officials from China, with plans for a 22-percent jump in government spending; India, with a planned increase exceeding 10 percent; and Germany, anticipating at least 6 percent.
Those officials “are just stunned” by the U.S. budget reductions, Dr. Collins said. “They read our playbook,” he said, “and they’re trying to become us, and we’ve sort of forgotten how to be us.”
Bias in Grant Awards
In addition to the general urge in Congress to cut budgets, the NIH faces trouble with some key Congressional leaders who have raised questions about research financed by the NIH and other federal agencies that the lawmakers regard as wasteful.
Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican of California who serves as chairman of the House oversight committee, has criticized the NIH for financing studies of substance abuse among women in Thailand and HIV prevention among hospitalized Russian alcoholics.
Rep. Lamar S. Smith, a Republican of Texas who serves as chairman of the House science committee, has suggested limiting the National Science Foundation to issuing grants that can be shown to promote the nation’s health, prosperity, or defense.
Mr. Smith, however, has taken steps to play down the controversy. A Republican aide on his committee said on Thursday that the chairman’s proposal would only require the agency to issue a public statement, after a grant has been approved through its normal process, describing the national interest underlying the grant. Such a requirement would not interfere at all with scientific freedom, the aide said.
At the same time the NIH is fighting for its budget in the wider political arena, it’s trying within its own ranks to ensure the quality and fairness of its grant-allocation system.
In one presentation on Thursday to the advisory committee, Roderic I. Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, reviewed the NIH’s effort to respond to a 2011 study that found racial bias in its grant awards.
Several advisory-committee members endorsed the NIH’s strategy, which includes seeking out and dealing with both potential biases among members of grant-review panels and potential disadvantages facing minority researchers in crafting grant applications.
One advisory-panel member, Peter R. MacLeish, a professor and director of the Neuroscience Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine, nevertheless said he remained concerned that the strategy didn’t do enough to ensure that black scientists won an appropriate share of NIH grants under their direct control.
In another presentation, Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, described the NIH’s strategy for confronting a problem in which large numbers of federally financed studies do not prove later to be reproducible.
That problem, and the continued lack of systems to prevent it, is “flabbergasting,” said one advisory-committee member, Reed V. Tuckson, executive vice president and chief of medical affairs at the United Health Group.