Fixing the NIH grant-making process
There's a piece in this week's Chronicle about some possible changes in the NIH's grant-making process. About 6 months ago, the NIH solicited suggestions from the general public for ways to improve the process, and an advisory committee has been sifting through the thousands of ideas they received.
The article describes a few broad classes of ideas:
- Streamlining the application process by reducing the length of grants from 25 pages to 15
- Limiting the number of proposals a person can submit
- Basing funding decisions more on an individual's than on specifics of their proposal
- Providing more affirmative action for younger scientists
These ideas aren't yet official recommendations - those won't be out until later this week - but they are likely indicative of the kinds of things the NIH will actually do. Many of these ideas are good ones; I'm just not convinced they will have the hoped-for effects.
Reducing the amount of effort required to submit a proposal sounds great. People invest huge amounts of effort on their proposals; I'd much rather have them spending their time doing science than chasing money. The trouble is that making it easier to submit a grant, will probably mean that people will submit more grants, driving the success rate down even more. Going back to the lottery ticket/grant analogy: during the budget doubling, the NIH increased both the odds that a ticket would win and the amount of money paid out by a winning ticket. Not surprisingly, people bought a lot more tickets. Streamlining the proposal process, while a worthy goal, effectively cuts the price of a ticket, which again increases the net payoff. If this happens, I predict we'll see even lower success rates in the future.
Limiting the number of proposals someone can submit is a non-starter, I suspect, despite the AAMC's endorsement of the idea. The idea has some merits: it would probably reduce the number of proposals the NIH receives and force people to submit only their best ideas. However, I think that there are legitimate scientific reasons for some larger labs to be submitting multiple proposals per year. Zerhouni opposes the idea. A better alternative might be to impose a surcharge, like publication fees charged by journals, to cover review costs on proposals after the first. This would reduce the number of people submitting multiple proposals while still making it possible to do so.
Judging proposals on the reputation of the submitter rather than on their content is a recipe for all sorts of trouble. Sure, it would make life more convenient for the elites, but I suspect that the result would be complacency, not greater willingness to take risks - just throw something over the fence and you get your funding, so why make the effort? Younger scientists are a source of a lot of crazy new ideas, but they don't have much of a track record, so this kind of scheme could shut them out of funding even more than they already are.
There's an alternative approach that I think avoids most of these difficulties - more next time.
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on Tue, Dec 11, 06:12PM
As someone just starting at the Assistant Professor level, I'm for anything that makes it easier for more inexperienced PI's to get a better shot at a grant - at least, the first time. Some institutes already have a policy to this end (adding 5% points). In theory I like the idea of basing the funding more on the PI than the proposal, but this would obviously hurt young investigators more - unless, they took into account "pedigree". Oh, he trained at Harvard, etc. That wouldn't be fair either, since plenty of smaller institutions produce brilliant people. Limiting the number of proposals would be arbitrary. Streamlining (shortening) the grants might make the review process go faster, but in many cases those extra pages are crucial to getting your ideas out there. If anything, I think shortening the proposals would help the "elites", simply because they can point to their past work in the form of papers. For us younger folks, who may not have as many pubs, we need the extra pages to cram in preliminary data. The only thing that would really help the grant making process is giving the NIH more money, so more grants get funded. Anything short of that is a stopgap measure until we get a president who cares more about science.
