Risk aversion at NIH
"Grant System Leads Cancer Researchers to Play It Safe" in today's NY Times highlights NIH's crazy risk averse grant making process.
...the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began. One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to take significant steps toward curing cancer.
What seems strange to me is that the people in the article keep blaming scarce resources for the excess of caution. The NIH's budget doubled recently with no real change in the likelihood of funding for risky proposals - if anything, things are worse because of the choices NIH made for how to spend the money. And NIH now has $10B of stimulus money to spend in the next two years. How hard could it be to find some dollars for risky proposals in that pot? This is not about dollars - it's about a fundamentally risk averse culture at NIH.
NIH is trying:
The National Institutes of Health has started “pilot experiments” to see if there is a better way of getting financing for innovative projects, its acting director, Dr. Kington, said.
They include “pioneer awards,” begun in 2004 for “ideas that have the potential for high impact but may be too novel, span too diverse a range of disciplines or be at a stage too early to fare well in the traditional peer review process.” But only 3 percent to 5 percent of the applicants get funded. Now the institutes have decided to set aside up to $25 million for “transformative R01 grants,” described as “proposing exceptionally innovative, high risk, original and/or unconventional research with the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms.”
These look like attempts to shoehorn risky projects into the current system - the grants look relatively large, which has the dual downsides of attracting lots of applicants and making the reviewers cautious (nobody wants to be the one to waste $1M or more on a failed project).
I think NIH would have much more success getting transformative results with a tiered system: lots of small grants (e.g. $50K-$100K) to test ideas; a modest number of mid-range grants to further advance things that emerge successfully from stage 1; and finally, the more standard $1M-$2M R01s for things that succeed in the previous stages.
I think the key is having large numbers of small grants. This would provide a lot of freedom to explore, and when some things fail - and they will fail - you're not out that much money. The NIH's current strategy is like investing everything in bonds and blue-chips: treasuries, AT&T, and Wal-Mart. If you do that, you get a safe return, but there's a very real opportunity cost: you miss out on the occasional Google. Investing small amounts in lots and lots of risky ideas is like having a diversified portfolio of start-ups. Sure, there will be lots of Pets.coms, but you'll also get some EBays and Amazons that you wouldn't get otherwise.
I suspect that there are two main reasons the NIH doesn't do things this way:
- First, I think that the people at or near the top of the NIH food chain would see any shift in resources away from R01s as a threat. You'll hear cries of neglecting "serious" research or the like.
- Second, reviewing and managing proposals is a resource-intensive process. The NIH has a hard enough time with getting their existing grants reviewed, and increasing the number of proposals funded would make things worse. I think funding smaller proposals would be easier, since the bar for funding would be lower, but still, it's by no means free.
In any case, I think it's great that this is making the front page of the Times. I hope that somewhere in the Obama administration, someone is preparing to light a fire under the NIH to get on this.
America's new export: excess PhDs?
What Helps New Ph.D.s Land Jobs in Academia? A Passport says an article in today's Wall Street Journal.
While hiring freezes and budgets cuts pervade U.S. higher education, universities in Asia and the Middle East are hungry for candidates, often amid a dearth of native applicants. Although most advertise their faculty openings all over the world, the schools see U.S. doctorates as prestigious and useful in recruiting students as they build their reputations.
The article is mostly about people in the humanities and social sciences, but I have been seeing some of these universities advertising for S&E faculty over at jobs.phds.org. Some grim statistics:
Hiring in English and foreign-language departments fell more than 20% this year at U.S. universities compared with a year ago, according to the Modern Language Association. Similarly, job postings of the American Political Science Association were down by 14% from 2007-08, and many universities didn't fill positions they initially advertised due to budget constraints.
Ouch! It's not like those markets were booming to begin with.
Benefits of Female Faculty
There's an intriguing piece in Slate on what looks like a very well designed study of the role of faculty gender on female students' career trajectories.
A few highlights:
The authors persuasively demonstrate that the overall male-female [student] performance difference is due in large part to the fact that men dominate the Air Force Academy science faculty (as is the case in most schools), with only 23 percent of courses taught by women....
the influence of professor gender was even starker for the set of students who were math whizzes when they entered the Academy (those with math SAT scores above 700)....
having a male instructor didn't just affect female cadets' performance in their first-year classes—ramifications could be seen throughout their undergraduate careers. Not surprisingly, students who did well in their introductory science classes were more likely to go on to obtain science degrees (and presumably go on to science-related professions). Among high-math-SAT students—those most likely to be the ones to go on to obtain science degrees—the authors calculate that having a women-only roster of faculty would create gender parity among science majors.
The upside is that this is a positive feedback loop: as more women join the faculty, the proportion of women further back in the pipeline increases.
Rankings Ruckus at Clemson
A former Clemson institutional researcher has just given an eye-opening presentation that described how the US News college rankings drove the agenda of Clemson's administration. The measures taken ranged from promising (decreases in class sizes and increases in admissions standards) to unethical (allegations that employees lowballed other institutions in US News's reputational surveys).
Regardless of the steps taken, it's crazy that a magazine has such sway over a university. Judging from the comments, Clemson is by no means alone - they're just more up front about what they are doing.
Preventing this kind of gaming is one of the reasons we set up the phds.org rankings the way we did. Allowing people to set their own weights for different criteria and using outcome measures rather than focusing primarily on input measures makes it much harder to game the system.
Lab Safety?
There's an interesting piece in Slate this week about lab safety (or the lack thereof) in academic settings relative to their corporate counterparts. The author may be familiar to some - Beryl Lieff Benderly writes for Science's Next Wave.
The article describes an awful chem lab accident at UCLA and then goes on to point out that non-employees (i.e. grad students and postdocs) don't fall under the workplace safety laws that cover corporate labs. The article claims that the safety standards in academic labs are quite poor, and many in the discussion forum concur.
Lab safety sounds like yet another good reason to classify postdocs as employees rather than leaving them in their current murky state.
"End the University as We Know It"
There's an op-ed in yesterday's Times with a great opening paragraph:
Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Unfortunately, it's long on suggestions for good places to be and short on ideas about how to get there. For example, item 6: "Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure." Who's supposed to do the abolishing? Tenured faculty? That seems unlikely. And I'm not sure that mandatory retirement is legal given anti-age discrimination laws.
Science Stimulus
Sam Wang (an old friend of Peter's) and Sandra Aamodt have an interesting proposal in today's NY Times for spending a chunk of the NIH's $8B stimulus funds: hire a bunch of recent college graduates as lab techs in a program modeled after Teach for America. The goal is to provide the needed supply of cheap lab labor without producing lots of extra scientists. I think the intent is good, though I wonder how useful recent college graduates might be in the lab. I wonder whether having recent college grads in the lab would encourage more people to go to grad school or less. It might encourage more to become grad students by familiarizing people with the lab - doubtless inertia would carry many on to further study. On the other hand, many would find out how much of a grind laboratory life can be. Richard Freeman published a great survey a few years back that showed that the more contact undergraduates had with grad students and postdocs, the less likely they were to want to go to grad school. I worry that without some change of course the NIH's windfall is going to be as much of a disaster as their budget doubling has proved to be.
The Times article points to a silly op-ed in The Scientist calling for the country to dedicate a fixed percentage of the GDP to scientific research. I, too, would like a fixed (and non-small) percentage of the GDP dedicated to my work. More seriously, though, I agree with the author's claim that variability in funding levels is bad for science. But pegging research spending to the GDP is definitely not the way to go. That would mean one more system awash in money during good times (and all the problems that entails - e.g. the NIH doubling) and starved during the bad. If anything, I think one would want a countercyclical mechanism: cut back government support when the economy is booming and increase it when things go south. During boom times it should be easier to find alternative mechanisms of support - foundations, corporate partnerships, and so forth. During busts, the government picks up the slack.
CS enrollments back up
The NY Times reports that undergraduate enrollments in computer science programs are back up. The explanation: competing alternatives for people with the required skill set have gotten less attractive. Investment banking is no longer luring people away. It's further supporting evidence for Richard Freeman's work on how numbers fluctuate in different careers - people on the margin between options are influenced by the relative attractiveness of different career paths. If you want more people to go into science, it's essential to make science attractive as a career.
Larry Summers revisited
From a new meta-analysis out of Cornell that reviewed 400 papers over the past 35 years:
"A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted," said lead author Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development at Cornell.
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