The numbers and the accompanying litany of woe are getting quite familiar.
The budget of the National Institutes of Health, the single biggest supplier of research dollars to universities, hasn’t beat inflation in more than a decade. The National Science Foundation and other federal providers aren’t doing a lot better.
On average, university researchers get into their 40s before securing their first independent grant. Full-time faculty research jobs are gradually being replaced by lower-paid contract work. Foreign competitors are matching or exceeding American science performance on a variety of important measures.
After several years of growing anxiety over whether those trends are temporary or enduring, thousands of university researchers responding to a Chronicle survey have helped answer a key question: For better or worse, the nation’s scientists have embarked on an unequivocal downsizing of their capability to perform basic investigative research.
The survey was sent to 67,454 researchers holding current grants from the NIH or NSF. More than 11,000 responded. Among the key findings: Nearly half have already abandoned an area of investigation they considered central to their lab’s mission. And more than three-quarters have reduced their recruitment of graduate students and research fellows because of economic pressures.
The respondents included Adam N. Goldfarb, a professor of pathology at the University of Virginia who counts himself—for now—among the lucky ones. He still has two active NIH grants, at least until the summer. But as he furiously writes new applications, hoping to continue his research into blood-cell development and diseases like anemia and leukemia, he peers out into a darkened hallway on his Charlottesville campus.
“We were packed to the gills about five years ago,” Dr. Goldfarb said of his side of the floor, where six of seven research labs now sit vacant. “It’s really depressing,” he said. “I go into work and there’s these black, empty spaces.”
Depression, discouragement, and stress were common words in the comments that accompanied responses to the Chronicle survey. Researchers expressed concern both for themselves and for their counterparts, including students who they had hoped would become the nation’s next generation of scientists.
Take those who have worked under Patrick S. Moore, a professor of microbiology and medical genetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Twenty years ago, Dr. Moore and his team discovered the viral cause of Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the most common cancers in AIDS patients. More recently, his lab found the viral cause for most Merkel-cell carcinomas, which kill several hundred Americans each year.
But now the three postdoctoral researchers who led the Merkel-cell discovery and then helped identify a promising possible cure are all unable to find permanent academic jobs, Dr. Moore said. Perhaps they’ll find work in a corporate setting, doing applied research, he said. But they “should be doing exploratory science to find the cause of the next cancer.”
Versions of that story are playing out in hundreds if not thousands of labs across the country, hitting especially hard in the past year, according to survey respondents, as governmentwide “sequestration” cuts followed about a decade of federal spending on basic science that advanced at around or below the rate of inflation, particularly at the NIH. According to a report just this month by the National Science Board, the NSF’s governing authority, fewer than 75 percent of the science and engineering doctorate holders employed in academe hold full-time faculty positions, down from 90 percent in the 1970s.
One important question that underlies such statistics but often evades rigorous analysis is whether the country and the world really need all those highly trained scientists and their studies. The Chronicle’s survey turned up at least a dozen researchers who felt that talk of crisis was overblown. Some suggested that smaller budgets would help researchers concentrate on the most important elements of their work, or bring a needed culling of a bloated scientific establishment.
Few agreed to express such sentiments without remaining anonymous. But most respondents argued otherwise. Bruce R. Donald, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke University, said he was in a recent meeting where administrators repeatedly used the phrase “the collapse of NIH.” It came up 15 times, he estimated. “We’re almost at the point where that statement may not be an overstatement,” Mr. Donald said.
It’s not that the United States needs less scientific exploration, said Kelvin K. Droegemeier, a professor of meteorology and vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma at Norman who serves as vice chairman of the National Science Board, at a briefing there this month. “We need to have that bag of capabilities be completely full.”
Proving that empirically, especially in the case of basic science, is virtually impossible, said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who has studied the situation of young scientists. Just as difficult, he said, is estimating the economic value of that research. As global connections make research exchanges easier, basic research has “some direct economic benefit to the U.S., but it’s probably overstated sometimes by advocates,” he said. “Maybe the U.S. ought to view its basic-research investment as a global-welfare investment.”
In a book due out in March, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent (Princeton University Press), Mr. Teitelbaum argues that the current downturn is merely the fifth “alarm boom bust” cycle since the late 1940s. Fears of scientist shortages lead to interventions in the form of money or visas, then a bust as interest wanes.
Cyclical or not, it appears that the current bust could weaken American university-based science for years to come. Among the researchers responding to the Chronicle survey, 36 percent said they expected more students to seek jobs abroad, and 21 percent have advised them to do so. Close to half, 42 percent, have advised students to seek careers outside academe. Several researchers described intentionally seeking foreign partners for their work to help prepare for an eventual move overseas.
Jason F. Huntley, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Toledo, said a former postdoctoral peer ended up opening a lab in Thailand, even though he had no connections there. The promise of brand-new lab facilities was too good to turn down.
Among those who stay, the survey reflected the widespread concern that tighter federal budgets leave professors spending far more time writing grant applications, and federal agencies far too likely to approve only “safe” proposals that promise incremental, predictable advances rather than breakthroughs.
“We’re being put into a position now where we have to know the answer of the experiment before we ever do the experiment,” said one biomedicine professor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of antagonizing the research agencies.
Many scientists, in fact, said they were too busy to complete the brief questionnaire. “I am writing grants and do not have time to fill this out—and you can quote me,” said Bonnie B. Blomberg, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Miami. “Sorry,” wrote another. “In deep grant-writing crisis at present—a consequence of the recent cuts—so, no time to do your survey.”
Writing grant applications has always been part of the deal for university researchers. For many, though, the chore has moved from nuisance to obsession because of a sequence of expansion—particularly at the NIH, where the agency’s budget doubled between 1998 and 2003—that led universities to hire faculty members who were increasingly made responsible for financing their own salaries through research grants. Then came the drought.
“I should be rewarded ... but instead I’m being kicked in the teeth.”
Dozens in the Chronicle survey spoke of taking early retirement rather than continuing to fight it out. They include Mark S. Cushman, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue University who led the development of two potential cancer drugs now in clinical trials. He has had his research group cut in half during the last three years. “I should be rewarded for my accomplishments, but instead I’m being kicked in the teeth,” he said.
That kind of discouragement is starting to show up in the NIH’s own statistics. Even as some researchers try to boost their odds by filing more applications, total grant requests fell last year for the first time in five years. With average approval rates in many fields dropping below 10 percent, researchers are saying, “I can’t build a career on that,” said Robert R. Recker, a professor of medicine at Creighton University.
That affects everyone down the line to students, who have fewer options for learning how to work in a lab. “If it becomes too hard or too constrained, then all the smart people will find something else to do, and that’s what’s happening with American students,” said Dr. Moore, of Pittsburgh.
Those in the middle include associate professors, the group many survey respondents said faced the greatest immediate risks. Though they have tenure, they are at the point of needing to renew existing grants, which is often tougher than winning first-time approval.
“From an institutional perspective, that may be more serious than an assistant professor failing to get tenure,” said David S. Hibbett, a professor of biology at Clark University. “If midcareer people fall off a research program, that’s a long-term problem.”
Mr. Hibbett said he’s not sure how long he can survive the competition—he’s contemplating his career’s “postresearch phase"—yet he also saw benefits from the financial pressure on researchers. “No one should go into science as a default career, so perhaps this will make people think more clearly about their choices,” he said.
Science students need to realize the long odds of becoming tenured research professors, said Richard B. Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard University and a leading authority on the scientific work force. But science doctorates are still valuable, he said, and the education system is gradually emphasizing alternatives, such as master-of-science programs.
As for universities, tightening budgets illustrate the need to develop a form of federal subsidy outside the grant system, said Mr. Freeman. Policy makers may need to find a more straightforward way to give money directly to universities than the “shell game” of overhead payments on research grants.
The odds of an imminent move by Congress to substantially boost federal support for science don’t appear promising. A 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center found that only 38 percent of Americans feel science is getting too little funding. Various polls have shown that percentage staying in the 30s across most of the past three decades, according to an NSF report this month.
More than just money, said many respondents to the Chronicle survey, the system needs an overhaul. Several said grant approval rates are so low that success seems almost random, and that’s unacceptable at a time when so many researchers, staff members, and students depend on grants to stay employed.
“We’re all feeling it,” Mr. Cushman said of the financial and structural problems hampering scientific research in the United States. “I’m not sure that the politicians are feeling it, though.”
A Health Scientist Lowers His Sights
A Health Scientist Lowers His Sights
Scott T. Walters
About four million people in the United States are on probation, two-thirds of them with drug-abuse problems. About a third fail to fulfill the terms of their probation, often getting arrested again, and often because of that drug use.
Scott T. Walters is trying to cut that proportion in half. With $2.5-million in promised grant money from the National Institutes of Health, he’s testing a solution that he estimates would save taxpayers more than $6-billion a year.
Mr. Walters, a professor of behavioral and community health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, has helped devise a computer-based system to give probationers with drug problems automated reminders and words of advice to help them avoid relapses. Originally he planned to recruit 600 former inmates in the Dallas and Baltimore areas and divide them randomly into three groups. All would attend standard meetings with their probation officers; one-third would also get the computer-based intervention; and another third would get similar guidance from human counselors.
But Mr. Walters has been forced to scale back the study. His five-year NIH grant is nearing the end of its third year, and so far the payments have been sliced by 26 percent.
The scaled-back plan calls for just 400 study participants. Statistically, that will be enough for Mr. Walters to draw conclusions about whether the computer-based option succeeds in cutting drug abuse. But he says it won’t be enough to establish the system’s effectiveness against recidivism.
“So you’re putting all this money in, and you’re walking away with something that might not be that useful,” he says.
Mr. Walters suggests that the current environment creates waste in several ways. For one, anticipating budget cuts creates incentives for researchers to overstate the amount a project will cost. For another, uncertainties can fuel the growth of “indirect costs"—the additional amount that federal grant agencies pay to universities to cover facility and administrative expenses.
The reductions in Mr. Walters’s NIH grant, for example, have forced him to cut the portion for his own salary to just four hours a week. He’s spending a lot more time than that on the project, meaning that the university is simply covering the difference.
Carving New Pathways Gets Tougher
Carving New Pathways Gets Tougher
Patricia K.A. Mongini
Multidisciplinarity is a hot term these days in science. As Patricia K.A. Mongini has found out, however, the priority that budget-conscious federal agencies place on cross-pollination doesn’t necessarily extend to individual researchers breaching scientific orthodoxies on their own.
Ms. Mongini is an associate professor of molecular medicine at the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, and she has been trying to carve a research path between two specialties of her colleagues.
Some of those researchers study types of inflammation, self-protecting mechanisms in the body caused by the production of fatty molecules that are increasingly associated with a range of diseases. Others concentrate on lymphocytes, types of white blood cells found in the immune system.
Ms. Mongini is a specialist in a particular kind of lymphocyte, known as B cells, and has been digging into surprising ways that they may both produce and respond to fatty molecules known as prostaglandins to cause diseases.
At age 63, Ms. Mongini is experienced enough to make some real progress on conditions affecting millions of people, and still young and energetic enough to do it. But with prospects of new financial support from the National Institutes of Health getting dimmer each year, she says, she will probably have to close her lab at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, where she is director of the Laboratory of B Cell Biology.
“We’re really sacrificing on people who have devoted their entire lives to really trying to work out problems,” says Ms. Mongini, whose remaining NIH grant runs out this month. “They have accrued knowledge, and we’re just basically throwing them out.”
She acknowledges her good run, noting that she started her own lab back in 1982 and secured her first NIH grant in 1985, then won three renewals while raising two children. After those renewals ran out, she found some foundation support. And when in 2008 her home institution, New York University, declined to support the turn in her research direction, the Feinstein Institute gave her a place to concentrate on B lymphocytes and prostaglandins.
Ms. Mongini says she’s convinced that federal support for the sciences will rebound eventually. She’s less sure about the fates of individual researchers trying to test out innovative approaches that don’t fit with mainstream research paths. That’s especially true, she says, for those who are trying to raise families and therefore might not produce the volume of journal articles needed to stand out in an increasingly competitive budgetary environment.
“Progress in science comes from more than just having one or two or 10 perspectives,” she says. “It comes from having diversity.”
For Want of a Microscope
For Want of a Microscope
Eric O. Potma
It’s hard to study what you can’t see.
For the past half-year, that’s been the problem for Eric O. Potma, a chemical physicist and associate professor at the University of California at Irvine, where he runs a small lab. For several years, his team has been studying the structure of cholesterol, using a technique called nonlinear Raman spectroscopy. It’s been one of their most successful investigations.
Then, last October, their $100,000 laser microscope broke down.
“That whole part of my project is on hold,” Mr. Potma says. The laser is only three years old, yet it looks unfixable. There’s no money for a replacement. “We are forced to re-educate ourselves and do something else,” he says. “That’s a sluggish process.”
Grants used to come easier for Mr. Potma, who moved to the United States more than a decade ago from the Netherlands for a postdoc at Harvard University. Fifty percent used to pan out. “Last year I think I wrote seven proposals,” he says. “So far not with any success.”
There’s always been a demand for his graduates: Several have gone to Intel, among other employers. Yet Mr. Potma has had to shrink his lab, down to one postdoc and six graduate students, eliminating four spots. “It’s a waste of a lot of time and effort,” he says. “Also wasted talent.”
One student, when her financing ran out, had to leave the lab. She didn’t want to stop; she had used personal loans and family money to keep working.
Then, just as it seemed her hiatus would turn permanent, Mr. Potma received some money from a company through a research agreement, allowing his student to return to a paid position.
Mr. Potma isn’t bereft. The U.S. Energy Department has been an essential source of support. He has other microscopes. But he worries about co-workers’ labs that have ground to a halt while waiting for new research funds. There’s little university money, once a bulwark in lean times, to carry them between grants these days.
It’s nearly impossible to start high-quality science from a standstill, Mr. Potma says. Continuity is key. Cut 2 percent of research grants, and it’ll take much more money to get that work back.
That’s what researchers, and the government, will face in the next few years, he says. “It’s a nonlinear process.”
A Dilemma: Cut the Staff or the Research
A Dilemma: Cut the Staff or the Research
Jason F. Huntley
Where had the money gone?
A year ago, Jason F. Huntley, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Toledo, went to check on the deposit of his annual financing from the National Institutes of Health. So far he had been lucky. A vaccine developer, Mr. Huntley had joined Toledo in 2010, supported by an early-career award. Within a year, he had his first R01, NIH’s gold-standard, five-year grant.
But when he checked the account that day, 13.5 percent was gone. The sequester had taken its bite. There had been no notice that the cut was coming, he said.
“Without that money, I had to make some serious decisions,” Mr. Huntley says. “Essentially we could keep everyone but reduce the experiments we do,” leaving researchers sitting on their hands. Or he could “cut one person,” he says, “and keep doing the research.”
The lab manager, Adnan Alazizi, was paid approximately the same amount cut from the grant. He was a model employee, helping everyone with their experiments on tularemia, a highly infectious disease passed from rodents to humans. He kept tight books and was taking evening courses in the M.B.A. program. He was also expecting his first child.
For two weeks, Mr. Huntley agonized over the decision. He pleaded with his program officer. But there was no more money coming.
“It was emotionally tough,” says Mr. Alazizi, reached at his new position as a research assistant at Northeast Ohio Medical University. “I was expecting to stay for another two years.”
Mr. Alazizi, who holds a master’s degree in pharmaceutical science, had been considering a job outside academe, because all the staff jobs seem too unstable. But after getting notice of his layoff, he found slim pickings in industry. He left Toledo with no hard feelings, and six months ago his wife gave birth.
His new boss at Northeast Ohio has offered to support his Ph.D. candidacy, but Mr. Alazizi, 32, is no longer interested. “There’s more opportunity for a master’s degree in industry than a Ph.D.,” he says.
The graduate students noticed when Mr. Alazizi left: The lab’s research has suffered, and everyone is working longer hours. Mr. Huntley is keeping the books now. He’s wondering what the March 1 deposit will look like this year.
But he also thinks back to what a former mentor told him.
“The government always has these funding cycles,” Mr. Huntley says. “Sometimes it’s high. Sometimes it’s low. He always told me that the people that have the guts to do this, you wait. You wait out the bad times.”
Basic Research Takes a Hit
Basic Research Takes a Hit
Giovanni Zocchi
Lawmakers who think university researchers just need to be more efficient with taxpayer money might be interested to meet Giovanni Zocchi.
Mr. Zocchi’s lab at the University of California at Los Angeles has been around more than 25 years, and has published several dozen journal articles in the area of molecular biophysics, an interdisciplinary mosh of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology.
It’s basic research, essentially finding new ways of using mechanical processes to control chemical reactions. Mr. Zocchi, a professor of physics, aims only at expanding the boundaries of knowledge, though his lab’s findings suggest some important applied applications for researchers in medicine and many other fields.
And he does it all, including training an average of four graduate students at a time, for about $100,000 a year. He needs just a few supplies and some basic equipment, and none of the money is used for salaries: The students all finance themselves by working as teaching assistants.
Yet even finding that small amount of money is now becoming a problem. Grants from his usual source, the National Science Foundation, have run out. His only remaining outside support—$30,000 from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation—is nearly depleted. Come May, when the NSF decides on Mr. Zocchi’s two pending grant applications, he’ll know if he can try reviving his lab or start shutting it down. With two of his four students having just graduated, he doesn’t dare take on two new ones in the meantime.
Mr. Zocchi is sure he could make money by pursuing some of the technical uses suggested by his findings, such as making a new type of probe for studying molecules. But his overriding interest is in sticking with the basic science, and investors who might help him start a company on the side want to see him develop the possible applications before giving him money.
He has wanted to write a book, and closing the lab could provide him the opportunity. “But that’s an incredible waste of resources and of previous investments,” much of it by federal taxpayers, Mr. Zocchi says.
Mr. Zocchi sees his lab’s approach as not just an efficient use of government money, but an effective one.
As budgets tighten, federal agencies increasingly aim for greater efficiencies by pulling together teams of researchers on projects deemed to have major societal value. But Mr. Zocchi contends that most of the important scientific breakthroughs in history have been the result of single investigators and small labs just following their intellectual curiosity.
“There is a need for a little bit of everything, big and small,” he says. “But the truly creative stuff in basic research almost never comes from the large-scale enterprises.”
Cuts Harm Blood-Bank Studies
Cuts Harm Blood-Bank Studies
Edward L. Murphy
For much of his career, Edward L. Murphy, a doctor and researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, has studied how donated blood saves lives—and, sometimes, how it takes them.
Dr. Murphy is one of the primary investigators of an NIH-financed project studying blood-transfusion safety in the United States and abroad. Founded in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the domestic program has now shifted from infections to allergies, pulmonary edema, and other common transfusion complications. Its new phase will create a database tracking blood cells and platelets from donors to patients—a long-awaited achievement.
Well, Dr. Murphy hopes it will be achieved.
Several rounds of 10-percent cuts have forced his team to eliminate several studies and to reduce lab work abroad. The database has been spared, for now. “If this keeps going,” he says, “we’ll have this huge work of huge expense that’s not going to be worth much.”
Of the two U.S. studies canceled, one promised to look at bone density in plasma and platelet donation, which requires an anticoagulant known to act on calcium. The other focused on teenagers: an investigation into whether the push by blood banks to recruit donors during high-school drives, which tend to feature a high fainting rate, could be causing iron deficiencies in still-forming brains.
Dr. Murphy has kept the studies of HIV in blood donors intact in South Africa, but the program has had to cut down on more detailed lab work. His international training, where he teaches doctors how to write and conduct a research protocol, has also been severely limited.
With so many of his peers’ salaries financed by research grants, Dr. Murphy has seen the university contract around him. Combine this frenzied grant competition with the caps NIH imposes on researcher salaries, and disincentives abound for M.D.-Ph.D.’s considering his career path. It seems much better to just go into private practice.
“Junior faculty see this,” Dr. Murphy says, “and say wait a minute, I’m not going to do research.”
Heading Down Under to Finance Up
Heading Down Under to Finance Up
Shelli R. McAlpine
A few years ago, Shelli R. McAlpine, a cancer researcher, became part of a small but growing tribe: the scientist who doesn’t just threaten to move abroad because of tight finances, but actually does it.
Until recently, Ms. McAlpine, a product of the University of California at Los Angeles and Harvard University, worked as a professor at San Diego State University. There she studied heat-shock proteins, microscopic janitors that keep the proteins of stressed cells from unraveling. Heat-shock proteins are vital for perpetually stressed cancer cells, making them a natural drug target.
Then came California’s budget crisis, with a cut in her already-thin salary, followed by furloughs. The peer-review bar for NIH grants had grown so high, especially for cancer studies, that it was essentially random whether good research would get financing, Ms. McAlpine says. She heard about one colleague even receiving tenure without ever having secured an R01, NIH’s flagship grant. Not long ago, universities expected professors to carry multiple R01s.
She went on sabbatical to Australia, where her family had moved when she was young. Twenty-five percent of research grants there were getting financed, she found out. It seemed magical. Within six weeks, she had a deal. Ms. McAlpine dumped her equipment and possessions into a shipping container, and, in 2011, began her new lab, as an associate professor at the University of New South Wales.
Her grants were comparable to what she used to get from NIH. “There was zero recessionary pain,” she says. “They were thriving. They were ridiculously thriving.”
She was also treated well. Her colleagues respected her credentials. People knew how tough it was to survive in the competitive U.S. system. “They sort of treat Americans as royalty,” she says.
Ms. McAlpine has even recruited others to her university. After she described her new financial paradise, a friend from the Scripps Research Institute came for a visit. He met with a dean, who made him an offer on the spot, Ms. McAlpine says. He accepted.
It hasn’t been all sunshine in Sydney. Research budgets have fallen in the past two years. “People are freaking out,” she says. But not Ms. McAlpine. She’s seen worse.
Data: Less Money, Less Science
