Kansas University announced an ambitious $800 million initiative today to add 900,000 square feet of research space to the medical school and to hire 244 new researchers.

The plan is part of a broader effort to roughly double the medical school’s research grants, which totaled $88 million in 2006, over five years and then to double them again in five more, reaching at least $340 million in grants by the end of 2016.

I wonder if the med school administrators have been reading Science lately? KU is a bit late to the party! The NIH budget doubling inspired similar moves by dozens of major research universities over the last 10 years; all told, schools invested $11 billion over the last decade "expecting to recoup their investments from the NIH grants investigators would haul in." That plan hasn't worked out so well: there are now so many new researchers applying for NIH grants (to pay for all those new facilities) that it's harder than ever before to obtain funding.

To make matters worse, the NIH funded programs at unsustainable levels during the doubling (“We didn’t model [annual budget] increases below 4% a year because the tradeoffs and sacrifices that would have been caused…were too difficult for us to deal with in the model.”) and is now having to scale the number of R01 grants way back. There are now fewer R01s than there were before the doubling started.

I wish them well, and I hope they do a little reading before they spend too many of their millions.