One year ago, the nation’s research universities were living large, with the National Institutes of Health handing out more than $10-billion in grant money from federal economic-stimulus funds. At the same time, the agency had no permanent leader imposing new demands on how its dollars were spent.
That has changed.
Six months into his job as NIH director, Francis S. Collins is close to announcing new ethics rules for universities and their scientists, to ensure that medical research isn’t corrupted by corporate financing.
That may not be the only shake-up. In an interview last week with The Chronicle, Dr. Collins also said he wanted universities to steer more money to younger researchers, to avoid letting their researchers rely solely on federal grants, and to share their scientific findings more widely.
In addition, the NIH, the nation’s largest provider of money for academic research, is warning universities that federal support will almost certainly decline after last year’s infusion of money from the stimulus measure.
The agency spends about $30.5-billion a year on medical research, and the stimulus measure provided a one-time increase of $10.4-billion. President Obama is set to issue his budget recommendation for the 2011 fiscal year next month, and, as Dr. Collins said, “I don’t think anybody right now imagines an outcome where the annual expenditures on biomedical research in FY11 will be as good as they were in FY10.”
Dr. Collins was chosen by Mr. Obama to lead the agency after a career as a premier genetics researcher and head of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Now running the NIH at a time of tight government budgets and growing global economic competition, Dr. Collins repeatedly described the need to challenge some of the long-established ways in which universities handle their research operations.
One bad habit of institutions is that they may be going too far, legally, to protect their research discoveries. At the genome project, Dr. Collins said, he recalls universities claiming patent-related restrictions on gene sequences even over the objections of their own researchers, who wanted to share this information with outsiders.
More recent evidence, Dr. Collins said, includes the lawsuit filed last year against the University of Utah, challenging its patents on human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
The NIH does have guidelines on overzealous patenting and licensing, and “perhaps universities should be reminded of them,” Dr. Collins said.
Some universities are also becoming too reliant on NIH money, allowing faculty members to obtain all of their income from federal research grants, Dr. Collins said.
Such faculty members run at least three or four research projects at a time, and “that turns that investigator into a grant-writing machine perhaps more than a doing-of-science machine,” Dr. Collins said. The practice suggests that the university is overreaching rather than investing in its core areas of expertise, he said.
Concern for Disruption
Any new restrictions in that area, however, “would have to be phased in over a fairly long period of time because many universities and faculty members would find that quite disruptive,” he said.
Dr. Collins said he was also hoping to tackle the long-recognized problem that researchers now reach age 42, on average, before they win their first NIH grant. His predecessor, Elias A. Zerhouni, focused on concerns that the agency’s conservative peer-review process does not take chances on younger grant applicants with short track records.
But Dr. Collins said he was looking more at universities themselves, saying that the age bias actually originates with institutions that don’t allow their younger researchers to apply for grants.
The NIH has been encouraging universities to adopt strategies such as the fellowships run by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. There, scientists are given laboratory space and guidance immediately after they get their doctoral degrees, Dr. Collins said. The NIH might even pursue such an approach through its own intramural program, he said.
“There’s a whole lot of ideas people have floated, and it doesn’t look as if so far we’re making much progress, so this is a hard problem,” he said.
Dr. Collins said he recognized the risk “that you’ll take a talented person and throw them out before they can swim, and ultimately have somebody who just crashes and burns.” But the Whitehead Institute experience shows that there are truly talented and deserving researchers at younger age levels who currently get “shoved into a postdoc position that might go on five, six, seven years.”
Officials at the Association of American Universities, the leading coalition of public and private research universities, said they had no immediate comment on the changes proposed by Dr. Collins.
On the issue of financial conflicts of interest among university researchers, the NIH director said he could not talk in detail until his agency issues its proposed regulations. He made clear, however, that it would impose new requirements on scientists to disclose income from medical companies whose sales could be affected by their research.
The researchers will need “to do a lot more than they used to do” to identify any possible financial entanglements, Dr. Collins said. “I feel quite strongly we have to get the house in order.”
Yet he said he still had faith that instances of misbehavior were rare, and with new rules, he said, “one doesn’t want to inadvertently do damage to the scientific enterprise by making it seem like no kind of collaboration is allowed.”
