Engineering Science - "Looming Crisis" at NIH Comments

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by Eric

2007-03-30T21:25:28Z

The people at "http://www.bestworkforce.org/" are a bunch of liars.

There is no "gathering storm" or "looming crisis" or "shortage" of any kind in the production of science and engineering PhD's. That was a lie in the early 90's, and its a lie now. In fact, there has been a pretty consistent overproduction of PhD's of about 20-30% yearly. Combined with massive importation of cheap labor on temporary visas, the job market is and has been saturated for years.

But don't just take my word for it. Take a good look at the job market. Think about how low salaries of scientists and engineers are compared to those of virtually any other professionals like physicians, lawyers, etc. That is only aggravated by the long training period of scientists (4 yrs college, 4-6 yrs graduate school, 1 or 2 postdoc's at 3-5 yrs each) before getting a real job. If there were a desperate shortage of scientists, then the job market would be hot for new PhD's, and salaries would be high. That is clearly not the case.

So, if anybody wants to start blowing wind and beating drums over a supposed shortage, let them back up their claims with actual fact. Junior scientists struggling to find a decent job would really appreciate some honesty once in a while.

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by Bob

2007-03-23T21:09:24Z

FYI, more coverage of the same event. It is interesting how Senators seem to also be pulling in the lobbyists they want to hear from to advocate an issue they are pushing for-like increased funding for NIH. I wish they would pull in someone to talk about increasing postdoc salaries or employing more research scientists as apposed to a linearly increasing number of relatively inexpensive postdocs. Bob

Senators Offer Sympathetic Ear to Complaints on NIH's Fiscal Slide

Science 23 March 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5819, p. 1646 DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5819.1646

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/315/5819/1646

News of the Week 2008 BUDGET: Senators Offer Sympathetic Ear to Complaints on NIH's Fiscal Slide Jennifer Couzin

Two powerful champions of biomedical research blasted the White House's proposal to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 and invited research leaders to vent their own frustrations at a Senate hearing this week. Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), who head the subcommittee that handles NIH funding, grilled NIH Director Elias Zerhouni on 19 March about the impact of what would be the fifth consecutive year of subinflationary budgets for NIH. They heard senior scientists describe a bleak research climate in which the percentage of funded NIH grant applications has dropped from 30% to 20%. And the senators promised to press for more money for biomedical research in 2008.

None of this was unexpected; Harkin and Specter helped win NIH a 2% increase in 2007 that the White House didn't request (Science, 23 February, p. 1062). More surprising was an impassioned speech by Zerhouni about the need for federally funded human embryonic stem cell research. In response to a question, he diverged from Administration policy, asserting that statements that adult stem cells can perform the same tasks as the embryonic variety "do not hold scientific water." He added that any attempt "to sideline NIH on an issue of such importance is shortsighted." . . Ironically, even though Congress gave NIH a small increase in 2007, the agency is under a particular strain because it is coming off flush times in 1998 to 2003, when it saw its budget double. That prompted many universities to expand, construct new facilities, and recruit new investigators, says Retzlaff. Between 1998 and 2007, the number of standard investigator-initiated (R01) grants roughly doubled to about 50,000. Such expansion requires long-term commitments, researchers said, because the agency provides most researchers with at least a portion of their salary and covers overhead costs.

"We bought in" to the doubling, "and now we're getting cut," says Joan Brugge, chair of the cell biology department at Harvard Medical School, in an interview before she testified at the hearing. Brugge, who began to study cancer in college after her sister was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor, says that the slowdown is especially frustrating given recent advances in understanding the basic biology of cancer. "This not only forestalls progress but creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety," she told the senators.

Scientists also spoke of undergraduates and graduate students turning away from biomedical research and senior investigators leaving the field after being unable to secure NIH funding. Robert Siliciano, who studies HIV at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said he used to spend 30% of his time applying for grants. Now, he told the senators, it's jumped to 60%.

Universities are already mobilizing to lobby for more funding. Immediately after the Senate hearing, a coalition of nine institutions and 20 scientists, including the four who testified, released a glossy, 21-page report that describes recent strides in cancer, spinal cord injury, and other diseases, arguing that NIH grants are well spent and lamenting the effects of flat funding.

But beyond the anecdotes, the researchers and university administrators offered up few hard figures on the harm flat budgets are causing. "I know this will not work out to be a mathematical formula," said Specter, but he professed frustration at a lack of data that he might offer his more skeptical Senate colleagues. "What's going to happen to NIH if the budget is cut by $500 million?" he wanted to know. "It would be very helpful to know how many research projects you are undertaking and how many you're turning away."

The hearing was the Senate's opening move in its consideration of NIH's 2008 budget, a process that is expected to take at least until the fall.

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by JS

2007-03-23T14:20:04Z

Put yourself in the shoes of a congressperson.

Or put yourself in the shoes of a Bush administration official. You've thrown huge increases at NIH in your first few years, and made what was at a minimum a good faith effort to compromise on stem cells, and gotten nothing but War On Science!!! and Looming Crisis!!! grief in return. Scientists continue to demonstrate the difference between being clever and being smart.

Incidentally, if I may reparent a late comment in an older post, I had to laugh at:

Stephen M. Strittmatter, a professor of neurology and neurobiology at Yale University's School of Medicine, told legislators that his laboratory's discovery of the NogoReceptor molecule occurred during NIH's budget-doubling period when he and other researchers were more willing to take risks. Today, he said, "researchers shy away from real discoveries. They've become worriers, not explorers."

Ohmigod, he was willing to screen an expression library with a ligand! What a risk taker! I mean, it was a nice paper but you'd think he had carried out one of the Mars rover landings.

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by Eliene Augenbraun

2007-03-21T20:42:51Z

The Storm is Gathering, no doubt.

Augustine wants to see college students as excited about careers teaching science as they might be to become football players.

Now most athletes know that they are unlikely to make millions playing sports yet still millions of people play (and get injured at) sports. THen again more millions just sit on the couch and let their arteries clog. The storm has been gathering for a while. That Nero guy did not get famous for fiddling in a day. Nobody can agree what to do while huge amounts of ink are used to suggest perfectly reasonable but annattainable solutions.

I remember back 10 or 20 years ago (yes I got my doctorate over 20 YEARS AGO! YIKES!) that the solution to the oversupply of PhDs and undersupply of science teaching talent was that we were all going to end up teaching science to high school students.

Um er...

By the way, I am not sure that the Gathering Storm is linked to BEST except perhaps through some individuals. The Gathering Storm was a National Academy thing, and BEST is addressing diversity in the workforce, based on some commission report several years ago. THey are a public private partnership, but I am not sure what they do besides convening blue ribbon panel meetings and publish reports.

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by Geoff Davis

2007-03-21T18:25:33Z

Yeah, I just saw Norm Augustine give a presentation on The Gathering Storm, which I believe is related. I'm planning to write up something about it next week. I should poke around to see if there is in fact a connection between those groups.

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by Geoff Davis

2007-03-21T18:24:09Z

Oh no! You're spoiling my line! Interesting findings, nonetheless, Jerry. We appear to be taking a slightly different approach - I'm looking at N(crisis + X)/N(crisis) and you're looking at N(crisis + X)/N(X). So what I'm computing is the % of pages with "crisis" that also have "education", and you're computing the % of pages that have "education" that also have "crisis". So basically what you're showing is that (very, very roughly) about 10% of the discussion of education involves "crisis", where I'm showing that (again, very roughly) about 2/3 of the discussion of "crises" involve "education." I think the latter is the more relevant thing to look at here, but your point about controls is well taken. (Incidentally, I think the high number for mental health may have to do with the fact that mental health issues can lead people to have personal crises - there are crisis hotlines, etc - like I said, all these things are very crude)

I definitely agree that things are already ugly, and I sympathize about your grants. The current pay lines are really low. The reason I am concerned about the next few years is that there are still a lot of people supported by the large numbers of R01s that were granted in 2002 and 2003. A lot of those grants won't be renewed, and the number of new R01s to replace them will be lower. Also, a lot of the new hires that Paula Stephan documented from the 2003 time frame are going to be reaching the end of their startup packages, so as people have said in The Scientist article, we may well be looking at a fair number of lab shutdowns.

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by Bob

2007-03-21T13:15:02Z

A Tale of Tow Crises

I think it is interesting to compare the two position papers below, both with the word "crisis" in the title. The first paper titled, "The Postdoc Crisis" provides an excellent summary of the S&E workforce challenges facing postdocs. In summary: 'not enough staff jobs to go around, but low-wage postdoc numbers keep increasing in step with funding increases'. There are several interesting graphs in the paper.

In contrast, the paper by an non-profit called BEST-Building Engineering and Scientific Talent claim we are facing an impending (or current) "crisis" of a shortage of scientists and engineers: "The crisis stems from the gap between the nation’s growing need for scientists, engineers, and other technically skilled workers, and its production of them."-BEST

Unfortunately, BEST does not provide data of an actual S&E shortage, it just discusses a hypothetical crisis using age old argument: foreign countries train more S&Es than we do and looming mass retirements. BEST also provides "data" from the Bureau of Labor Statistics [www.bls.gov], where a handful of statisticians claim to be able to accurately predict the job market ten years into the future despite the inability of the BLS to accurately provide the actual job creation numbers for LAST month [Feb 07], let alone in Feb 2017.

Unfortunately, BEST was commissioned by and testified before Congress, the authors of the "Postdoc Crisis" paper have yet to be invited to do so.

Bob

1.

The Postdoc Crisis

http://cip-etats-generaux.apinc.org/IMG/pdf/ThePostdocCrisis.pdf

In the last quarter century there has been an enormous growth in the number of postdocs. Like their predecessors, they remain poorly paid, but now the average scientist will spend more time as a postdoc,

will have a harder time securing a faculty position and will likely be required to do a postdoc if he or she decides to enter industry. 1

The Quiet Crisis: Falling Short in Producing American Scientific and Technical Talent

http://www.bestworkforce.org/PDFdocs/Quiet_Crisis.pdf

There is a quiet crisis building in the United States — a crisis that could jeopardize the nation’s pre-eminence and well-being. The crisis has been mounting gradually, but inexorably, over several decades. If permitted to continue unmitigated, it could reverse the global leadership Americans currently enjoy. The crisis stems from the gap between the nation’s growing need for scientists, engineers, and other technically skilled workers, and its production of them. As the generation educated in the 1950s and 1960s prepares to retire, our colleges and universities are not graduating enough scientific and technical talent to step into research laboratories, software and other design centers, refineries, defense installations, science policy offices, manufacturing shop floors and high-tech startups.

This “gap” represents a shortfall in our national scientific and technical capabilities. The need to make the nation safer from emerging terrorist threats that endanger the nation’s people, infrastructure, economy, health, and environment, makes this gap all the more critical and the need for action all the more urgent.

http://www.bestworkforce.org/

Comment on '"Looming Crisis" at NIH' by Jerry Hedrick

2007-03-21T00:34:28Z

Geoff, I heard/read your goggle story previously. Sorry Geoff, I think the strategy is bogus. At first read, your conclusion seems reasonable. However, you didn't run any 'control' experiments. If you google the words below and then add crisis, you get the following percentages of the original hits.

Mental Health 53% Iraq 24% Poverty 22% Defense 14% School 13% Education 10% Research 10% Religion 9% Budgetary 7% Housing 3%

Words that are at the top of the list are understandable since mental health in our country is in a true crisis situation - and the Iraq mess is commonly referred to as the Iraq crisis. However, school, education, research, and religion are in the middle of the list with lesser association values. Housing - which for a family whose home was devastated by Katrina has to be a real crisis - is at the bottom of this list. So what does this tell us about the 'google-crisis-approach' to science funding? Likely, it simply reflects current attitudes in our US culture. Attitudes which are fundamentally alarmist and extreme in nature - and we're afraid of everything (the Bush administration has propagate the belief that we need to be afraid). Listen/read the news –everything is blown out of proportion - and we are in a state of crisis or excitement about the most trivial of things. Your second topic stated "I think this is going to get pretty ugly." Sorry again to disagree, but I think it has already gotten ugly! Over the past 3 years, I'm 'batting' 0/8 grant applications/resubmissions for 3 different projects to three different federal agencies. The 'ugliness' I've experienced is more related to the review process and panels than to policies of the agencies themselves. I believe the funding agencies need to get more assertive in directing 'the panel' review process if the Matthew effect (aka Robert K. Merton) in research funding is be avoided.