Dueling Scientists
I have been hearing of hallway conversations in
research labs across the country bemoaning the new
difficulty in winning Research Project Grants from the
National Institutes of Health. The prevailing theories for
this new intense level of competition for funding typically
ascribe the problem to three main causes. First is the
belief that money is increasingly being diverted to fund
the NIH Roadmap. Then there is the conviction that more and
more money is being moved from basic research to applied
research, meaning clinical trials. Finally, there is
grumbling that too many targeted initiatives are robbing
basic scientists of their appropriate share of the NIH
budget.
Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH, has an article in
the Nov. 17 issue of Science that provides factual
data regarding this matter. He shows why investigators,
despite the doubling of the NIH budget over the past
decade, are finding it harder and harder to get research
grants. And the news is not pretty. First of all, he
carefully debunks the myths above, showing that funding for
basic science and for Research Project Grants as a
percentage of the NIH budget has not been shortchanged, and
that spending on the Roadmap accounts for just over 1
percent of the total NIH budget. He reminds readers that
the Roadmap is not a single large initiative but one that
funds hundreds of individual investigators.
But most importantly, Dr. Zerhouni shows why the
problems we are facing are more profound — and far
more worrisome — than is generally appreciated. The
real reason why investigators are having difficulty getting
funded is attributable to two distinct factors. First,
there is simply more demand. During the years of the
doubling of the NIH budget, the number of research
investigators applying grew by more than 80 percent. The
number of grant applications has doubled. Moreover, because
of inflation, each application today is 40 percent more
costly than it was in 1999. Then there is the unhappy news
about what has been happening to the NIH budget since the
doubling: In real dollar terms, it actually has been
decreasing. This is the third year in a row, when adjusted
for inflation, that NIH funding has been cut. The
biomedical research enterprise created by the NIH doubling
has been cut by nearly 11 percent in real terms since 2003.
If you consider these factors together, it doesn't take a
statistician to predict that success rates for getting new
grants will fall, and funding will become more competitive,
for all scientists. This, of course, is exactly what has
happened.
While the doubling of the NIH budget was a very good
thing, funding for other scientific research agencies did
not keep pace. Now nonbiomedical scientists are crying for
much-needed increases in the National Science Foundation,
the Department of Energy and other federal research
budgets. Unfortunately (but perhaps not surprisingly), this
has begun to create tension between different scientific
groups over increasingly scarce resources.
In my view, internecine warfare between dueling
research scientists is absolutely the last thing we need
right now. It will be counterproductive for all research
universities and all scientists in the long term. For
instance, if Congress decides to give another $300 million
to the NSF (an entirely worthy decision) but cuts $1
billion out of the NIH budget, the numbers show we have all
lost. This is in part because such an action will seriously
damage the scientific infrastructure.
Universities have made long-term commitments and
borrowed heavily to rebuild core research facilities with
the expectation that facilities and administrative costs
recovered from federal research grants will cover a portion
of those costs. We have constructed somewhere on the order
of $15 billion to $30 billion of new research laboratories
in recent years and have recruited new faculty to build
upon U.S. leadership in emerging areas of science such as
genomics, proteomics, nanotechnologies, microfluidics and
other exciting new disciplines. If grant funding declines
in inflation-adjusted terms, the indirect costs of these
new facilities will reach excessively high percentage rates
that may not be sustainable, even over the short term. The
result will be financial distress for many research
universities along with lowered direct costs available to
individual investigators. If universities cannot balance
the bottom line because NIH funding is cut below inflation,
nonbiomedical scientists will feel the pain along with
their biomedical colleagues.
When physical scientists argue that the NSF budget for
physical sciences should be increased ("It's our turn
now!") the result may inadvertently be less than a zero-sum
game overall. While we may make cogent arguments for larger
increases in funding for certain types of scientific
research, dueling scientists in Washington fighting over a
shrinking pie will ultimately make bad public policy for
all.
That's why a consortium of CEOs, university presidents
and senior officials chaired by Intel chairman Craig
Barrett and myself have been advancing the concept that the
United States' overall investment in scientific research
must do better than simply keep pace with inflation. In
part, this is a practical recognition that our nation's
research establishment has made long-term financial
commitments and infrastructure enhancements based upon that
premise. There needs to be a funding floor — a rate
of research funding growth we will always meet. At a
minimum, I believe our country's commitment to science
research should be at least the biomedical inflation index
plus 1 percent.
The United States' dominance in basic science and
technology is being challenged worldwide by other nations
that are investing heavily in basic research and bolstering
their research universities. We are all aware of the
competition out there, as other nations are mounting an
eyeball-to-eyeball challenge to American technological
leadership. This is no time for the U.S. to blink.
I am asking all Hopkins scientists to join hands and
speak a common message: The research funding floor should
be inflation in the costs of research plus 1 percent.
William R. Brody is president
of The Johns Hopkins University.
GO TO