The Yankees and Research Funding
As I read Geoff’s posts about the University of Kansas Medical Center, and the seeming mismatch between what they are clearly expecting with regard to NIH funding and what the national NIH funding picture looks like I made me wonder: how could an institution pull off a major increase in NIH funding?
The answer is simple: hire some major research talent. I imagine that one could do a search on all NIH R01 grants and develop a ranked list of which individual investigators are getting the most money. Hire those guys and gals. Or, hire some of those Howard Hughes Fellows – those guys and gals are loaded.
In science, just as in baseball, the data are available to rank order the players by whatever criteria you want. If it’s money you want, you could assemble the “dream team.” But, like George Steinbrenner, you’re going to have to have a lot of money to do it.
The coupling of money and scientific talent has been known for a long time. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and a handful of other schools have huge endowments and a [halo effect] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect) that attracts more money in the form of alumni donations, private contributions, etc. Government money is also drawn to such honey pots because:
- These schools have attracted top talent (both faculty AND students)
- There often have better facilities
- The “halo effect”
This is a self-re-enforcing mechanism that helps the rich schools get richer while the “also-rans” get to scurry around for the crumbs. And when NIH funding gets tight I would speculate that the relative decline in funding is greater for the second-tier schools than for the top 10.
The halo effect also works in reciprocal. Young hot-shot professors cannot help but experience a shiver of glee when they get a call from the President of MIT or Stanford. But the University of Kansas?
This is where shrewd marketing and recruiting comes in. The Dean of the Medical School of the University of Kansas cannot hope to compete on the same terms as Harvard or Caltech. But maybe there are other terms that might sway a young hot-shot. How about a cushy job for her spouse? Or maybe the potential for building a huge research empire may appeal? Some of the top research schools are at a significant disadvantage in a number of quality of life areas. Good luck buying a house as a UCSF professor (unless your wife happens to be an investment banker). And Caltech is nice but if you have to live in Glendale? Forget it! But you don’t want to offer too cushy an environment for your prospective hotshot – you want her to remain hungry and monomaniacally focused on bringing in the big bucks.
Kansas’s attempt to leap over its peers in terms of NIH funding will require some really state-of-the-art buildings. But it will rely even more on attracting the most successful researchers (with success measured not in teaching quality, contribution to the campus or nice looks but solely MONEY). There have been examples where a top Ivy science department has gotten complacent and has been displaced by a hungrier rival. If the Kansas State Legislature or the Kansas Congressional delegation want to help – good for them.
But don’t forget the simple truth of baseball: what sells tickets is the players, not the stadium.
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on Thu, Jun 21, 07:06AM
It's been interesting to see this series of articles, as I am currently a postdoc at KUMC. And since you ask...I see no problem with the medical school having lofty ambitions. If it were UCSF or Harvard, no one would question these "benchmarks". Of course, the fine folks of the rest of Kansas need to work on their stance on evolution and stem cell research, but that's another matter.
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on Thu, Jun 21, 09:06AM
It's not Kansas. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, a bunch of universities are all trying to do the same thing. With NIH funding flat, it's pretty unlikely that all (or even most) will succeed. If UCSF or Harvard said they were going to quadruple their funding in the current funding environment, I'd think they were being rather optimistic as well. In fact, Kansas would probably have an easier time with a quadrupling since they are starting from a lower base.
I spent some time in Kansas City recently and was pleasantly surprised. The city council has been doing some thoughtful urban planning, and, despite my coastal bias, it looks like a good place to live, especially given the low cost of living. So that should help.
Michael Lewis's book Moneyball describes how the Oakland A's built a great team on the cheap a few years back by using statistics to figure out what players contributed the most to team wins. It turns out it wasn't the obvious (and expensive) superstars; rather than hiring a bunch of showboating home run hitters, they brought in cheaper players who consistently got on base. It worked like a charm, at least for the first season (not being a baseball fan, I'm not sure they've held up or if they're still following the strategy).
I wonder if there are similar kinds of strategies that KUMC could follow?
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on Thu, Jun 21, 12:06PM
Evan and Geoff,
I can't help but take the baseball analogy to (absurd) extremes. Imagine if we could determine the "winningest" researchers in various disciplines - publishing such a list would probably freak everyone out but it would clarify who's on top and for how long. (Maybe AAAS should publish trading cards with their pictures and list of recent grants and Science publications - sort of the baseball card analogy to Karen Hopkin's Studmuffins of Science calendar that she put out a few years back).
More seriously though, Barbara Atkinson (Vice Chancellor) should have a very specific business plan that specifies how such a large expansion of R&D funding can be achieved. It doesn't HAVE to all come from the NIH - she should also think about state money, other agencies such as the VA and DOD, and Congressionally-directed funding. Evan - maybe you can tell us if there's much biotech or pharma in your area that could be part of an industry/medical center consortium. An aggressive, multi-pronged business plan, targeting specific "customers" and aiming for strong (but not absurd) rates of growth would be extremely valuable. If done right, KU could really make a move.
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on Thu, Jun 21, 02:06PM
Peter - Let's put it this way, I don't think the biotech/pharma would attract Alex Rodriguez or Albert Pujols.
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on Thu, Jun 21, 03:06PM
This reminds me of a question I've long wondered about. If you only knew about the US university system from reading Nature and Science and Cell, you'd think there were only 20 universities in the country. (I once was talking with a German postdoc at MIT who did think that!) But the difference between winding up in a position at, say, UCSD versus KU has such a large element of luck, you'd think that the difference between the faculty at the 15-20th top schools and the 80-90th top schools can't be that much. So why do you almost never see the latter in top journals, at least in the molecular biology literature I read?
My best guess is that the quality of grad student (and, to a lesser extent, postdocs) is the key limiting factor, which suggests that you can't bring in a bunch of profs and expect them to change everything.
Interestingly, Singapore has done a remarkable job of developing a world-class genomics community from basically zero, in less than a decade. But doing that in a small country is different than doing it in one corner of a huge country.
