Engineering Science - Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge Comments

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-02-05T00:16:29Z

The auction idea is interesting, but it seems more appropriate for people pursuing things that might actually pay off in the short term. For such things, the existing venture capital system probably works just fine.

Where government investment makes the most sense is for situations where venture capital doesn't work:

Research on things that advance knowledge but are not in and of themselves profitable. E.g. proving the Riemann hypothesis.
Research that is too risky for private investors (e.g. very long time to payoff or very speculative work). E.g. basic research on, say, stem cells.
Research on things where it is hard for a private investor to recoup an initial investment. E.g. does a particular non-patentable compound have disease-fighting properties?

Geoff

PS Yes, Lazear and Rosen's work is spot on.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by octavian

2007-02-04T22:39:53Z

This last post really is the best. Eric C Seales would want nothing more than a "scientific labor market" czar that would make the decisions. You could hire Adolf; i guess he'll do a great job. What makes you thing you would have better odds?

And why 100K, why not 10K? If we spread the honey wide, let’s make it wide enough....

There are 2 easy ways out:

The govt. should get out of funding rich schools that can afford to find the cure for baldness by themselves.
Or it should auction the grants to the highest bidder.

The former will never happen (too much pork involved...); the latter might have a chance.

Let's imagine that you are a brilliant researcher from a small poor school (econ theory says if you really are brilliant you would not be at the poor school long, but anyway, let's assume..), you come to the NSF for the grant. There are n! Other guys like you in there, how do you discriminate amongst so many alternative use of money? You could have a political process..like about now. or you can use the old price system. Proclaim that those are interest-free loans that need to be returned from the proceeds you get for the "thing" you invent (if not enough to cover the initial outlay you know your invention was a WASTE) . Both researcher and school would be responsable for paying back the money. NSF could also require lower returns from research done in preferred fields. I guess nobody that wasted time to write on this page (me included) would no longer apply.

PS If you want to know why it looks like a pyramid see: Lazear, E. P. and S. Rosen, (1981) "Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts," Journal of Political Economy, 89, 5, 841-64

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Eric C Seales

2007-01-27T01:09:18Z

I have a question...

Would it be feasible to have a permanent position for a nonscientist whose sole job is to deal with the scientific labor market, or perhaps as an advocate for junior scientists? Ideally, a labor market economist would have both the distance from science and the credibility to act in such a role. Importantly, are there any mechanisms by which such a position could be created so that it both A) has power to enact policy changes and B) is independent of other agency scientists?

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Glen

2007-01-26T20:16:59Z

Why would it produce better science and not just a happier workforce? I'm sure that many people would find this question a no-brainer, but there are actually a number of possible answers. The first is born of bitter experience: many big labs behave as corporations. They have little in the way of altruistic goals, but are more interested in accumulating currency (currency being publications, grants, perhaps even Nobel prizes...). While I think this is true, I don't actually think it's the main reason for making such a change. The main reason is that, as I mentioned, very interesting things can be done with limited resources. But what is absolutely vital is a diversity of perspectives and a critical mass of busy beavers out there doing the work. One example I like to cite is a paper that was published (I think in Science) a few years ago where the authors amplified DNA in a test tube with nothing more than convection (cold water running over the top, warm on the bottom - i.e. no thermocycler). What were the total costs associated with such a paper? $1000? Less? Sure, there's no disease cure in it (at least not on the face of it), but it is interesting, creative science and an example of what can be accomplished for almost nothing if you let your mind run free a little bit. I personally feel that I have an idea or two that I could tackle for $50K or less that would have very direct disease application.

And this is the most telling part of the equation: I am currently looking for work in any field OTHER THAN academic research. I'm an outside-the-box thinker who is absolutely devoted to the idea of state-funded academic research, but I no longer want to have anything to do with it. It's not worth ruining my own life.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-26T18:08:02Z

Glen,

I think you're spot on about splitting overall funds into big science and small science pots. I bounced the idea off of a friend at NIH, and wrote about his reaction here. I think one would need to make a different set of arguments - why would making such a split produce better science (as opposed to happier scientists)?

Thanks for the pointer to the concept award application - I'll take a look.

Geoff

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-26T18:03:46Z

Eric,

I think you've hit on one key issue here: "There is nothing noble about a system that rewards rather than punishes universities and PI's for crass exploitation of the youngest and most vulnerable."

The incentive system is out of whack because nobody keeps track of things like, "Do PhDs from a given program get jobs?" That's going to change in about 2 or 3 weeks - watch this space!

What's the story on Zerhouni declining to meet with an army of the disgruntled? I'd love to hear more.

Geoff

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-26T17:59:27Z

Jonas,

A handful of issues:

Universities have their own pots of money to draw upon (e.g. undergraduate tuition), so they can always reshuffle things around to some extent and pay for lower-cost stipends out of pocket.
If postdoc salaries went up enough, they might be sufficient to tempt even more people into graduate school in the hopes of landing lucrative postdoc positions. The NSF has raised the amount of its own graduate fellowships to about $30K, if memory serves me correctly, and one side effect is that way more people apply for them than before.
The more grad students and postdocs make, the less incentive there is for them to leave the nest and get real jobs. If a postdoc pays $60K but an assistant professor starts at $45K, who's going to leave?

Geoff

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-26T17:51:43Z

BioGuy--

Penalizing high overhead rates is an interesting idea. A generalization: one might add in a cost penalty term to the evaluation process -- that's what Calculus 101 would tell you to do to maximize total "quality" subject to a constraint on total budget.

One problem with doing so is that it's not clear that people can usefully disentangle "quality" from cost in the evaluation process. Presumably there is some ill-defined, implicit accounting for cost, but I wonder how rational it is? If one were to submit 2 proposals that were identical except for the budget, I wonder how they'd fare? It's even conceivable that some types of research activity are Giffen goods - the more costly they are, the better people perceive them to be.

Penalizing overhead seems at first glance like a good idea, but then again, overhead pays for important things like lab space / support / etc.

I can't see NSF / NIH phasing out support for graduate studies for political reasons. Can you imagine the outcry? "NSF/NIH cuts education!" Even if they were to take such a drastic step, the trouble is that NSF/NIH only directly fund a relatively small fraction of students, and research funds are fungible. Instead of paying for students with my NSF grant, I shuffle money around a bit so that the NSF grant is paying for, say, my lab space, freeing up university funds to pay for more students.

Geoff

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Glen

2007-01-26T15:53:27Z

(Sorry if someone mentioned such a scheme above, but I just didn't have time to read all the comments.)

By no means have I given up on coming up with new schemes for funding, but here is the most recent one that has occurred to me. I observed the type of big science that is done in labs with access to millions of dollars or euros of funding, and am of the opinion that this work needs to be facilitated. Unfortunately, it remains a minority of such highly-funded laboratories who actually produce value for money. On the other hand, a lot of really interesting science can be done for very reasonable sums. How many Ph.D.s would kill for a secure corner of lab space, a salary, and 50K a year for reagents? I would therefore propose breaking up at least a part of funding into tiers or leagues.

It would function as follows:
For any overall grants budget, the money would be divided in some ratio appropriate to the goals of the agency or the pool of candidates. Let's say 30% big league, 70% little league.

The big league grants are going to be the very juicy tidbits, the ones that the monster labs want. Grants of $1-3M per year, say. Obviously, with such grant sizes, relatively few such grants are given out, and competition is stiff.

On the other end of the scale are the little league grants. These are of much more limited size. Say $75-150K. Of course, because they are small, there are many more to be had.

Now the trick is, researchers must declare themselves "big league" or "little league", and they will be restricted accordingly. Thus Weinberg and Vogelstein will not be vaccuuming up grants in the little league. At some defined intervals, say once a year or 18 months, researchers can switch leagues if they feel their circumstances have changed.

Along the same lines, I think physical institutes need to reassess their vocations. Many seem to want to be mini pharmas or Celeras. I certainly have no problem with pushing to have big research done, but I think it's important not to neglect the bottom of the pyramid. My institute recently underwent a change in direction that was followed in short order by the expansion of three or four laboratories and the departure of a large number of junior researchers. I'm of the opinion that the productivity of the larger labs does not equal what was lost in the junior labs. (The institute must remain larger than any of its individuals.)

Last point. I like the US army's concept awards. These are 1 page applications, no preliminary data required, 5 references maximum. Most importantly, no name or identifying marks allowed on the application. A great means to foster new ideas.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by BioGuy

2007-01-25T22:05:23Z

Eric,

I couldn't agree more with your sentiment - but there will never be a willingness to change as long as those with power stand to lose in the reform. This is why I think a restriction of funding to "professionals" can work - the proposal is at minimum revenue neutral to those granting as well as those receiving the grants. The possibility that the system can eventually gain revenue from tuition seeking candidates means that the idea might have a shot.

There is also a political angle in this. The argument that the U.S. taxpayer is paying to educate thousands of PhDs then ship them home to compete against the country is a powerful one. (Using this logic, the doubling of the NIH budget may actually have hurt the U.S. competitively in the long term by accelerating technology transfer.) If one switches NIH funding to provide support for stable, professional positions and lessens support for short term graduate & post-doc positions then the situation inverts - the U.S. is able to hire the world’s best and brightest on a long-term basis without footing the bill for training.

Also, the effects of overpopulation are more widespread than solely academia (although it's certainly worse here). Salaries & conditions in industry are certainly better, but still not in line with similar degrees. (MD, JD, MBA).

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Eric C Seales

2007-01-25T20:38:32Z

Thank you Geoff Davis for inviting discussion and potential solutions to this problem.

As a junior scientist who prudently left academia (and any remote desire to spend 80+ hours/week writing grants to survive) for better pay and better odds in industry, I think it is my duty to plead to anyone who will listen for sensible science policy.

The current academic grant funding crisis is NOT a temporary aberration due to short-term policy swings. Congressional budgets come and go. Funding increases for several years, then there is the predictable cut, and THEN there is the mad scrambling, the dying off of the junior tenure track people, the hard times and gnashing of teeth in the halls of the ivory tower.

While increased federal funding and/or complex changes by granting agencies in how grants are awarded and/or reviewed can mean career life or death in specific situations, no amount of funding or policy changes can undue the tragic consequences of a sustained glut in the academic labor market.

If you want to fix the grant funding crisis, fix the underlying illness plaguing the scientific profession in the first place! Fix the shortsightedness, the mindlessness, that fuels a perpetual overproduction of PhD's. If we want to be a healthy profession, if we want to attract the bright and the young to this career, then we must convince them that this is a noble and rewarding profession. There is nothing noble about a system that rewards rather than punishes universities and PI's for crass exploitation of the youngest and most vulnerable. There is nothing noble about a profession in which the odds are AGAINST a young scientist ever being able to feed children with their PhD, a profession in which a young woman is punished rather than rewarded for wanting children.

For all but the most established and secure scientists, this is an outrage. It is a shame upon every one of us. It is destroying this profession. And it doesn't take a scientist to understand the long-term consequences of eating your young.

The question is not whether funding/policy agencies like the NIH and NSF can make meaningful policy changes; the question is not even "how" to do it. The REAL question is "when will agencies such as the NIH and NSF be willing to make changes?" Was the NSF not responsible in the early 1990's for all those bogus alarms over phantom scientist shortages? Did not Zerhouni himself recently decline to meet face to face with disgruntled junior scientists? There will be no meaningful change until there is willingness to change. And I don't see that on the horizon.

Until then, the best and the brightest of a new scientific generation are LEAVING in droves.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Jonas Gustavsson

2007-01-24T17:51:42Z

Since there seem to be a surplus of scientists, maybe we could cut back on production a bit. NSF could help through requiring grad students and postdocs paid off grant money to be paid above a minimum level - say $25k for a grad student and $40k for a postdoc. This is bound to reduce overproduction and may also lead to better quality both on incoming students and on the training offered since outsourcing more janitorial tasks may be a more attractive option than previously.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by BioGuy

2007-01-24T02:06:19Z

Upon doing a tiny bit of research I see that the NIH has implemented a cap on indirect costs in some areas. This seems like a blunt approach to the problem, as some institutions truly may have higher costs than others and ultimately it is impossible to know what the breakeven cost is. It would seem to me a better approach is to simply incentivise lower costs by rewarding them and then letting the chips fall where they may.

Still, it is a step in the right direction so we shall see what effect this has in absence of a fix for the other problem(s).

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by BioGuy

2007-01-24T01:36:03Z

BioGuy@dodgeit.com

I may have a long term fix. But for it to make sense, I need to further define the problem. The current dip in funding rates is due to an increase in submissions. The increase in submissions is due to: 1) an increase in the number of submissions per submitter and 2) an increase in the number of submitters. I would argue that the first problem is a non-issue after certain current incentives (below) are removed - the best proposals should be funded and no one ultimately has a monopoly on brilliance. In other words, an increase in submissions per investigator should only go as far as that investigator's ability to do the work.

With each funding raise, we increase the number of graduate student stipends in the U.S. This in turn leads to an increase in the number of investigators a decade or so down the road. As every P.I. turns out multiples of PhDs over the course of his/her career the system is inherently unstable in any funding environment other than significant growth. There are many indicators of the problem: decreased domestic undergraduate interest in the field, increasing degree times, increasing time spent in post-doc, and decreasing percentages of postdocs landing tenure track positions. (This is in spite of a modest increase in total tenure track positions nationwide.) In sum, the larger problem is a glut of PhD scientists at every level – but as it pertains to the current question we will consider only the increase in principal investigators. There are far more applicants than P.I. positions, and universities stand to make mint off of NIH grants with indirect charges ranging from 40%-100%. The result is an eagerness for institutions to hire relatively cheap professors to rake in as much grant money as they can. Of course, the grantees require space which requires a large capital outlay thus blunting the growth of this phenomena. Nonetheless, the end result is the growth in investigator numbers in periods of NIH growth to levels beyond what most would consider comfortable in a zero fiscal growth environment. Thus, I argue that any increase in funding will only result in a short-term solution. The real problem in approval rates are twofold: the creation of fiscal incentives for universities whereby they financially gain from research beyond the true ‘cost of business’ and a simple supply/demand imbalance in the PhD scientist marketplace.

The fix for the first problem is in the way indirect costs are considered. NIH and NSF grant scores should be adjusted by a multiplier of the institution’s overhead. Thus, proposals from institutions charging high overhead would be at a vast disadvantage. Competition for grants would push the marginal gains from indirect funding to zero for the institution, thus removing the incentive to spew the marketplace with applications. I believe that there has been some movement in controlling indirect costs, but the existence of charges in excess of 50% at many institutions indicates it continues to be a problem.

The second solution is a trickier fix. I think the best option in fixing the investigator supply/demand imbalance is to overhaul the system at the base so allow me to digress before returning to the problem at hand. We are producing more PhDs than the market would otherwise demand. On the other hand, there is an ever growing need for more science to be done. Why not solve both by a simple rearrangement of funding? If we were to gradually phase out the funding of graduate stipends and instead fund professional scientist positions we would be subsidizing the demand for professional scientists while allowing the supply to float with the ‘intellectual marketplace’. Graduate studies would need to be self funded, as is the case with the M.D. Initially, the number of students willing to pay their own way would be near zero – this is itself is a good indication that the rewards of the degree are not commensurate with the demands and the reason for the gradual phase in of the shift. But as the demand for new scientists continued to grow through natural means plus the increase in NIH/NSF funded scientist positions the salaries of these individuals would be driven upwards. This increase would eventually justify students in taking out loans from financial institutions for the PhD. Domestic interest in the field would rise while our ability to retain the best foreign scientists (regardless of country of education) would increase through a stable job market. The federal government would get more productivity for it’s dollar as trained scientists working as a team are more productive than ever-rotating and inexperienced graduate students. Academic institutions would see an increase in funding as federal grants became supplemented with private tuition fees. Scientists would see an increase in competition for their services resulting in increased compensation. Sure, the young would be saddled with debt, but this burden seems less problematic when set against increases in salaries. See the market for US physicians for a comparison. I suppose that private industry would be dissatisfied with having to pay higher scientist salaries, but the implication that Pfizer needs federal subsidization in this area seems wrong.

Lastly, the supply/demand fix and its implication to the original question. As the overall market for PhD scientists became more competitive, universities would have to follow with increased salaries. This would naturally result in a decline in the number of positions available. (If this personally seems like a move in an undesirable direction, remember that it has resulted from an increase in the overall scientist market combined with a decrease in supply.) Combined with the decreased incentive from indirect funding, universities would be less likely to gamble on short term gains from the research lottery and instead focus on its vast intrinsic worth. The number of NIH submitters and submissions would drop until success rates were high enough to warrant the investment.

This proposal is incomplete and certainly can be improved. But it’s something different and I believe the basis for righting the biosciences funding and employment problems in the U.S.

Discussion, criticism, and improvements welcome.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T21:53:12Z

That's an interesting idea. One tricky thing is that there are legitimate reasons for multiple submissions.

For example, suppose that your proposal is rejected, but the reviewer feedback indicates that if modest changes were made, it would be much stronger. Of course you would revise and resubmit.

Alternatively, suppose you run a lab with a couple of postdocs. They are working on separate projects, and you want each project funded. The postdocs can't apply for R01's themselves, so you need to submit 2 separate proposals.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T21:48:35Z

Excellent point, Dan. I'm trying to get a dataset from NIH on their recent grants. It would be interesting to see if there has been a shift of resources from lower-tier to higher-tier institutions. It would be tricky to quantify "tiers", since grants are probably not broken down by discipline, but I'm sure I could cobble something together. I'd be shocked if lower-tier institutions were losing out in relative terms. The real question, as you suggest, is whether they are losing out in absolute terms. Hmmm...

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T21:45:07Z

Interesting. Is there somewhere I could learn more about European grantmaking practices?

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T21:44:33Z

Yes, you would think that a biologist would know that when you feed organisms, they grow. For some reason a lot of scientific leaders seem to ignore basic economic realities when it suits them.

I suspect that this kind of behavior stems not from ignorance, but rather from a view of the world in which there is only a small elite core of people who really matter. The folks at the top of the pyramid are doing very well indeed right now. I believe this kind of view stems from Kuhn, but I must confess to not having actually read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It's on my list for future discussion.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Dan G

2007-01-23T21:04:36Z

I agree that selling a "small grant" program to congress will be harder than the big Science & Technology Centers at top-quartile universities. But this is a matter of scientific infrastructure. If the present trend keeps up, departments at the second tier schools won't be able to pay for their graduate students from external fellowships, and some of the second tier Ph.D. programs will by necessity close down. If the second tier programs close instruction of undergraduates will suffer, and that has long-term implications for the health of science in the US.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by SV

2007-01-23T19:10:37Z

How about limiting the number of submissions from any PI in a period of time? Would this help with the downward spiral and half-cooked idea problems mentioned above? If you knew you only had one chance, wouldn't you work to make it stronger?

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Les Reinlb

2007-01-23T18:36:33Z

I think your comments about small $100K grants are very useful. In my experience in Europe, many labs received small running budgets pretty much automatically. It might require only a 5 page application that could be turned around very rapidly. One could then compete for larger amounts to run more complex projects or to purchase cutting edge equipment.

I think this process might work to keep labs afloat and to retain trained scientists even in lean times.

Les

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by JS

2007-01-23T18:13:13Z

Let's say you have a flask of bacteria grown to saturation. You pour in an equal amount of fresh LB and put it back in the shaker. What happens?

The NIH's budget was doubled and in roughly one generation time, approval rates went back to where they were before (and may now have overshot)? Is anyone genuinely surprised by this? The current process of developing scientists is a pyramid scheme, and like any pyramid scheme, throwing in more capital can only push the problem out a little further.

Reading Zerhouni's piece in Science, where he expressed complete bewilderment at the results of the budget doubling and called for another batch of LB to be dumped in, I couldn't decide which would be more disturbing: that he was being disingenuous or that he was being sincere! If he and the rest of the NIH leadership truly don't understand that more money equals more faculty positions equals the same approval rate, I'd say that's pretty alarming.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T01:24:47Z

Good stuff - you would have enjoyed it! I'm sure you managed to find fun things to do in London, though.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T01:23:47Z

Hi Jackie!

I think the NSF is just crying poverty in the hopes of scaring up some more money. Here's what I found at http://nsf.gov/about/budget:

Year / $ in millions
2001 $4,416
2002 $4,789
2003 $5,310
2004 $5,578
2005 $5,473
2006 $5,581

Apart from the 2% dip in 2005, they've been doing pretty well. All in all, a 26% increase over the last 5 years, way more than inflation.

I think the problem is one of increasing the size of grants rather than the number.

But yeah, you are definitely right about people submitting more often. Acceptance rates go down, so people apply more often, which pushes acceptance rates down further, and you get a nasty downward spiral. Scientific hyperventilation. I've seen some data from NIH that shows that that's part of the problem, but I can't tell how much, exactly, from the data they've published. I'm in the process of trying to get ahold of a data set to see what I can figure out.

Hope you had a good trip back to Houston!

Geoff

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T01:03:15Z

I agree that a pot of money for smaller grants, sub-$100K maybe, would do a lot of good.

A couple of other potential concerns:

First, NSF/NIH/whoever ends up with a lot more overhead from the selection process if they move to larger numbers of smaller awards. They'd have more awards to oversee and probably more proposals to review. No agency likes more work when the returns are harder to explain.

Second, from the point of view of an organization trying to make the case to Congress to get more funding, it probably looks a lot better to be handing big chunks of money to high-profile, blue-chip, high-probability-of-success projects, than to a bunch of little, maybe riskier projects. I personally think having lots of little, riskier experiments will pay off in the long run, but then again, I don't have to get grilled on the House floor every year about what I have done for them lately.

Any thoughts?

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-23T00:54:51Z

Yeah, from reading Zerhouni's recent defense of NIH's activities in Science back in November, it sounds like there are lots of different special-purpose pots that people are advocating raiding. I'm sure all those pots have their strident defenders.

As for longer grants: last year I attended a workshop at the National Academies on an evaluation of the Markey Scholars program. If memory serves, the Markey Fellows got 7 years of funding - it was basically a couple of years of postdoc money plus maybe 5 or so years of research support for one's faculty career. It was a pretty boring meeting, but one thing that struck me was anecdotes about "Markey babies". Apparently a lot of the women who received these awards immediately had kids. I wonder if longer-term funding might be a way to help alleviate some of the family / career conflicts that seem to be at the root of the women-in-science issue.

One downside of longer awards is that it pushes you back into big-money award territory. Sure, award recipients apply less often, but you can give out a lot fewer $500K awards than you can, say, $100K or $200k awards.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Victoria McGovern

2007-01-23T00:21:11Z

So how was the science blog conference?

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Jackie @ Element List

2007-01-22T03:21:41Z

I need to look at the funding data, but NSF has been hurting for funding basically since 9/11. Sure, Bush signed a statement saying that we should double funding, but it wasn't a law and isn't binding in anyway. Funding for all of the government science agencies is being held flat for this year, which is a real decrease in funding due to inflation and expectations of even modestly higher funding levels.

One reason for the sudden decline in approval rates that has been often floated around by NSF managers and scientists is that because there is so little money, scientists are submitting MORE proposals to improve their odds with the expectation that only one or two might get funded. Also, new proposals often have kinks that need to be worked out, and scientists have come to expect that their proposal won't be funded the first time around, but will need to reviewed and edited, pretty much like any journal article submission. So they'll sometimes turn in a half-cooked idea for the first round to let the reviewers work on it, then resubmit it with revisions and a higher expectation that it will be funded.

Regarding NSF funding of multiple institutions - this is very attractive to the funding agencies because (a) they get to spread the money around, supporting a lot of groups rather than making one group 'rich', and (b) they're spreading the risk that the research might not get done by betting on multiple capable partners.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by hardworking faculty

2007-01-21T13:26:01Z

I agree.

Background: There are many faculty who have given up on even trying for NSF. I know this from my own department (a top 20% engineering research department) where there are several very capable faculty of 20+ years post PhD experience each who do not even bother to write NSF proposals anymore. Why? because they are tired of being the "papers on the the cutting floor", the 85% who spend months writing proposals that go nowhere.

The interesting thing is that those who gets the constant grants from NSF are not noticeaby better in research. I say this as a department chair, who has seen the output of everyone, and can compare objectively.

However, the faculty who do not get NSF funding tend to be better in teaching - perhaps because they have more time to devote, and are not constantly chasing their tails to raise $$.

Small grants - even less than 100k - would give such faculty a boost of confidence. Even enough money to allow them to travel to conferences, to get a decent PC, would make a difference.

You might say such trivial amounts should come from the university. but the fact is that those who generate the "big bucks" suck up all the small blobs of money - through overhead returns (kickbacks IMO) etc.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Dan G

2007-01-21T03:45:05Z

A few more thoughts: It seems like the NSF (and NIH) have been tending to throw large blocks of funding toward interdisciplinary centers that cross departmental boundaries at a single institution, or multi-university research initiatives (MURI) that are more single-topic in scope. The funding for these centers has often been substantial, but after seeing a number of these in action, I'm convinced that they are part of the problem. The centers often have one or two "rich" and very well known PIs. There may be some that really do engage in interdisciplinary research, but most center PIs use them as easy sources of cash without doing anything "interdisciplinary". The problem is that as younger faculty are brought into an institution, the centers very rarely open their doors to new members. This tends to leave younger "poor" faculty out in the cold, and keeps the rich programs well-funded. I've seen a number of center proposals that were funded when the individual PI contributions to that proposal were substantially weaker than what the PIs would propose on their own.

Other ideas: the standard length of grants should be increased to 5 years from 3. The rate at which faculty are now required to write proposals (instead of actually, you know, doing research) has become quite high. The biggest benefit of the CAREER program at the NSF is the length of the grant, and anyone who has had one can tell you that those 2 years are a huge benefit, particularly because they typically postpone the renewal until after the tenure decision. I think longer term grants will lower the number of proposals that are submitted across the board.

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Geoff Davis

2007-01-20T15:41:09Z

I think that something along those lines is an important piece of the solution.

There are several potential obstacles. One quick one: Lake Wobegon syndrome. Everyone thinks that they are above average, so why should they settle for a piddling $100K? I think there's very much a perception of zero-sum science: a pot of small grants would shift resources away from those doing big science, and those folks will kick up a big fuss. I've heard this kind of thing in the context of suggesting that postdoc salaries be improved, etc. What's the counter-argument?

Comment on 'Zerhouni for a Day: A Challenge' by Dan G

2007-01-20T13:28:54Z

This isn't realistic for NIH, but could work at the NSF (which has a much clearer basic science mission):

How's about a single-grant cap of $100,000/year and a prohibition on grant concurrency? $100k / year is enough to keep a small program afloat, and this would insure that the total grant pool was spread out beyond the "rich" programs.