E-Letter responses to:

p-forum: Elias A. Zerhouni RESEARCH FUNDING: Enhanced: NIH in the Post-Doubling Era: Realities and Strategies Science 2006; 314: 1088-1090 [Summary] [Full text] [PDF]

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Published E-Letter responses:

More Institutional Support for Research Faculty

Robert E. Hurst   (29 March 2007)

Reducing the Size Limit for New NIH Awards

Nevin A. Lambert   (12 March 2007)

More Institutional Support for Research Faculty 29 March 2007
Robert E. Hurst Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center, 940 S. L. Young Boulevard, Oklahoma City, OK 73104 Respond to this E-Letter: Re: More Institutional Support for Research Faculty	In his ringing defense of the status quo of NIH-supported science, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni put his finger on the real problem with our profession, perhaps unintentionally. The main reason for dropping success rates is that science is like a bacterial culture; increasing the food leads to a rapid proliferation until food again becomes limiting. Zerhouni points out the proliferation of research facilities that accompanied the increased NIH budget and concluded that, “[t]his is just what the nation wants and needs.” Whether this last statement is true is debatable, because the nation would then be willing to pay for the increased research. Flat budgets and balking by legislators to further increase a $30 billion budget tell a different story. Our current system needs a fundamental overhaul. Under the current system, institutions have little investment in their faculty, even tenured ones. Faculty are expected to pay most of their own and their workers’ salaries from grants. This arrangement allows institutions to receive the approximate 50% or more indirect costs with little financial exposure, particularly if philanthropic sources or state legislatures pay facility construction costs. Institutions limit the number of tenure-earning positions, while the meaning of tenure erodes to exclude salary, again as a means to limit institutional financial exposure. As a result, science is not an attractive career, and many of the nation’s brightest and best go to other fields. To staff these profitable research facilities, scientists from other nations are recruited and the “research track” is invented, further eroding the attractiveness of science to our own increasingly diverse population and robbing other nations of their brightest and best. Additionally, innovative research is difficult to fund, and success is further concentrated in fewer high-profile institutions. Remedies include making a fundamental change in our system by limiting the fraction of a grantee’s salary that NIH will pay to 75%, for example; requiring principal investigators to hold a tenure-earning position; capping the fraction of an institutional budget that can come from NIH; and, of course, decreasing the amount of indirect costs. The point is to limit the number of participants, require institutional investment, and thereby provide some badly needed stability in the system. Robert E. Hurst, Ph.D. Professor of Urology Member, Oklahoma University Cancer Institute Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Adjunct Professor of Occupational and Environmental Health
Reducing the Size Limit for New NIH Awards 12 March 2007
Nevin A. Lambert, Associate Professor Medical College of Georgia Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Reducing the Size Limit for New NIH Awards	Considerable attention has been paid by Science to the current crisis in NIH funding of biomedical research (1). This attention is certainly justified as pay lines continue to fall towards single digits, and frustration and despair grow among the ranks of NIH funded (and unfunded) researchers. NIH Director Elias Zerhouni has laid out an appropriate set of priorities aimed at supporting young investigators, improving peer review and improving communication of the benefits of biomedical research to the public. However, the Director’s plan for balancing supply and demand lacks specific measures that would appreciably increase funding for new investigator-initiated projects, but instead focuses on past cuts to existing grants and administrative efficiency (2). Perhaps the time has come to make the truly difficult decision to reduce the size of new awards. This is hardly a new idea, and NIH already limits R01 awards to ten $25,000 modules. The module limit could “float,” allowing NIH to maintain reasonable success rates during budgetary fluctuations. A reduction in the allowable number of modules for new awards would immediately produce a substantial increase in success rates and provide a much needed boost in researchers’ morale. The need for highly disruptive cuts to already funded programs would be reduced or eliminated (3), and funds would be freed for broad initiatives such as the NIH Roadmap. Both new and established investigators would be better able to start or maintain productive programs, and peer reviewers would no longer be faced with the impossible (but now mandatory) task of discriminating between projects in the tenth and fifteenth percentiles. The drawbacks of decreasing the module limit are equally obvious; reducing the funds available for each project would necessarily limit the scope of some projects. However, the current limit can already be exceeded if compelling justification is provided. More importantly, the question of grant size versus success rates reduces to whether science and the public interest are better served in the long run by supporting more ideas from fewer people or fewer ideas from more people. The most valuable component of the U.S. research infrastructure is unquestionably the human element. The loss of talented investigators, both those who already have and those who are considering research careers, is a loss that society can ill afford. The NIH should, therefore, set a high priority on maintaining existing human infrastructure. A decrease in the size of new awards would be a tangible step in that direction. References 1. D. Kennedy, Science 314, 1515 (2006). 2. E. A. Zerhouni, Science 314, 1088 (2006). 3. J. Mervis, Science 314, 1862 (2006).