Universities and the money fix

Nature has been running some good stories this past month on the mess at the NIH.

Universities and the money fix, by Brian C. Martinson, points out what I think is the central problem:

[L]argely because of the structure of the funding flows between the NIH and the universities, there are few checks in the system to keep competition for grant funding at a healthy level. Thus, calls for further increases in the NIH budget may only make matters worse. In my view, it is time to ask the biggest beneficiaries of NIH largesse — the universities and academic health centres — to find ways to balance supply and demand that better reflect their obligations to researchers and society....

(emphasis added) Exactly right. The current problems are structural in nature. Anything that fails to address the underlying issues can only serve at best as a temporary stopgap.

There are insufficient 'feedback loops' linking the production of biomedical researchers to the availability of resources to support them. Instead, the educational system is replete with incentives to generate ever more PhDs and medical doctors. In the short term these arrangements may benefit universities, but in the longer term, such extreme levels of competition for funding are unsustainable. And they may already be doing harm.

The harm Martinson sees is greater potential for ethical lapses, something also predicted by David Goodstein. Reader BioScientist has more to say about the potential for harm in a comment on the NSF's new postdoc mentoring requirement:

None of these proposals matter, nor will any changes or improvements to them. The bottom line is that as long as there are too many scientists present the competition to stay alive will be intense and therefore conditions will remain poor. NIH/NSF proposals like this attempt to legislate behavior without recognizing the realities on the ground.

The lack of attention to graduate/post-graduate training is borne from two areas: 1) PIs are pushed by the system to extract every bit of effort possible effort from employees. The penalty for not doing so is a loss of funding and the end of a career. 2) As long as there are multiple applicants for every scientist/PI position there's less need to insure development of most individuals. As an example, one can simply ignore the bottom sixty percent of CVs to no ill effect when considering tenure-track positions. Those that remain will no doubt be pretty impressive. In this respect, post-graduate training is less an education than it is a 'selection' process in the biological sense. Put another way: why bother training postdocs, when most of them will fall out of the "system" anyway? The best will claw their way to success on their own and the rest are irrelevant. (This is a sentiment I've heard multiple times from faculty at my current Tier-I, top-20 research institute.)

Until the supply of PhD scientists comes back into line with demand working conditions will remain poor, salaries low, and hours long. In absence of a solution to the supply/demand imbalance all attempts to solve the resultant phenotypes will fail.

While I agree with Martinson's diagnosis, he unfortunately doesn't offer much in the way of solutions:

So is the only solution to force long-time NIH grant getters into retirement? Perhaps not. Universities have benefited handsomely from the efforts of senior faculty members in securing NIH grants during their careers, perhaps those same universities could now return the favour by taking full responsibility for paying these faculty salaries in their later years. This would serve the dual purpose of getting them off the NIH dole, and encouraging them to share their knowledge with their younger colleagues through more teaching.

Getting enough senior scientists to give up research for teaching to make any kind of difference seems, um, implausible.