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NIH Crisis
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.
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.
Ginny C just pointed me to a recent FASEB presentation that summarizes recent trends in the life sciences labor market. It's great that they have done this, since I suspect a lot of people don't know the big picture, and FASEB has a very broad reach. Give it a read.
There is a great deal of overlap with Paula Stephan's findings and a few other things that Peter and I have discussed here.
A few things that struck me in the slides:
I knew that numbers of women have been increasing rapidly in the life sciences, but the graphs in the presentation are still pretty striking. Ditto for the number of postdocs on temporary visas. Success rates for NIH fellowship applications have been falling almost as fast as for R01s. They're down from ~45% in 2001 to ~27% in 2006. NIH spending on students as a percent of the total budget is down from ~4.3% in 1985 to ~2.7% in 2006 Foreign PhD recipients are increasingly staying in the US The fraction of all US biomedical PhDs who are tenured or in tenure-track positions is steadily decreasing. ~46% in 1981 to ~28% in 2006 Almost all the new positions created during the NIH doubling period were MDs in clinical departments Hiring of PhDs by med schools has pretty much ground to a halt in the last couple of years. Average GRE Quantitative scores are surprisingly low for life sciences folks: 529 for health sciences and 606 for biological sciences applicants (out of 990 total). I have always wondered if part of the reason the labor market for life scientists is so much worse than for physical scientists and engineers is that quantitative skills give the latter folks more options.
There's an intriguing article in yesterday's Times about a new theory about the factors that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution in England.
For centuries, England's citizens lived on the brink of starvation. Although innovations would periodically increase agricultural productivity, greater access to food invariably led to population increases, which in turn brought per capita food levels right back to where they started. It took the Industrial Revolution to finally bring the growth rate of the food supply above the growth rate of the population.
Historian Gregory Clark's study of wills from 1200-1800 found the following:
Given that the English economy operated under Malthusian constraints, might it not have responded in some way to the forces of natural selection that Darwin had divined would flourish in such conditions? Dr. Clark started to wonder whether natural selection had indeed changed the nature of the population in some way and, if so, whether this might be the missing explanation for the Industrial Revolution....
Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.
As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.
Clark speculates that there may be genetic and/or cultural components to these changes in behavior:
Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”
What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”
I don't know enough about behavioral genetics to have a sense of whether this is plausible; regardless, his application of Darwinian thinking in this particular case is intriguing.
Substitute funding for food, and it's clear that the current NIH mess is a Malthusian crisis. And as with England, this is only the most recent of a series. What are these selection pressures doing to the population of academic scientists?
When times are tight, it becomes a lot less pleasant to be an academic. Fewer proposals get funded, and even if you do get funded, a lot more work has to go into your proposals. Industry starts looking a lot more attractive by comparison. Increased numbers are forced out, and more interestingly when we start thinking like Darwin, increased numbers either leave by choice or never seek academic careers in the first place.
Economics tells us that the more attractive one's industry prospects relative to academic alternatives, the more likely one is to end up there. And if you work in industry, you don't "reproduce" by training students. Thus, academia's Malthusian crises may very well be selecting against those who are most capable of success outside of academia.
Funding levels in academia are driven by the prospect of economic returns to investments in research. Unfortunately for all concerned, unlike Clark's hypothesized England, academia appears to be selecting against some of those most capable of increasing the "food" supply.
While the NIH budget doubling has created a crisis for life sciences grant applicants, what about its benefits? One of the most pronounced effects of the budget doubling was a huge building spree by medical schools. Presumably there has also been an increase in research output, right?
A new NSF report makes me wonder. According to the press release, "the number of U.S. science and engineering (S&E) articles in major peer-reviewed journals flattened in the 1990s, after more than two decades of growth.... Flattening occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions."
I haven't read the full report yet, so I'm still scratching my head. Here's the report, and here's a discussion on Slashdot.
The Chronicle reports that the National Science Board (the overseers of the NSF) are urging the NSF to fund riskier projects with the potential for big breakthroughs rather than safer, more incremental projects. (Here's the NSB report)
Taking more risks is likely to be a good thing for NSF. Consider the financial analog: it's like holding nothing but T-bills in your portfolio. Adding stocks (a riskier asset) to the mix in the right way can dramatically increase returns without greatly increasing risk.
I hope the goal of increased risk-taking on "transformative" research finds its way into the NIH, because if anything, the NIH is even more risk-averse than NSF. How much more can you do to avoid risk than the NIH's policy of (a) requiring in essence that people demonstrate that their projects will work before funding them (requiring "preliminary data") and (b) placing heavy emphasis on an established track record? These two policies are particularly hard on young people, who research suggests are more likely to come up with creative new ideas: because they are young, they don't have much of a track record, and and without an existing lab and funding in place, it's quite difficult to generate preliminary data. The result: less and less funding for young researchers.
The NIH is undergoing an examination of its own grantmaking processes as well in the wake of plummeting rates of grant success. Perhaps the National Science Board's report will shape their thinking?
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.
I sent a note to the reporter who wrote the story on the KU Medical Center expansion; here is his reply:
Geoff,
Thank you for your note, and for passing along the Science magazine article.
I have written on this topic before as I increasingly am hearing from
researchers about the intensifying competition for federal grants. So far,
Kansas researchers appear to be defying the national trends. NIH funding at
the KU Medical center rose 22% last year, which means, a top medical center
official said today, that Kansas researchers are taking federal money away
from labs in other states.
The university's ability to maintain this success with a vastly expanded
program will be a very important issue to consider as the community is asked
to support the endeavor. I will strive to draw more attention to the issue.
Best regards,
Jason
Jason Gertzen
The Kansas City Star
I was impressed by the recent growth in the KU Medical Center's funding, so I decided to dig in a bit. While I was up at NBER earlier this spring, I wrote some code to parse all the NIH's data on awards. Here's what I found about the University of Kansas Medical Center (hope I have the right place - I didn't see a Kansas University Medical Center):
The medical center did have impressive growth from 2005 to 2006 (11%). However, in the years before that, it stayed the same (2004-2005), fell by 6% (2003-2004), rose by 2%, etc. There has been growth over time, but the rate has fluctuated considerably from year to year. It's quite possible that the 11% gain last year was just random variation. (I'm not sure of the reason for the discrepancy between the growth rate Jason cites and what the NIH numbers show - the NIH data sets I'm using may be incomplete)
Over the last 5 years, the medical center's NIH funding grew by 15% overall, from $35M to $40M. That sounds impressive until you consider that total NIH grants grew by 26% over the same time period. To double their funding in the next 5 years, the medical center's funding will have to grow by 15% per year, roughly 5 times the current rate. Part of their growth over the last 5 years came from the tail end of the NIH's budget doubling. This time around, that boost won't be there. I'm sure the additional people will help; no doubt the new hires will be under tremendous pressure to bring in money.
I wish them well.
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.
View archives for December 2007.
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