Flat funding stifles young scientists, Harvard president tells Congress

The article is a bit one-sided. There is no input from the side of the parties doing the granting, nor is there any commentary on other forms of funding that may or may not be growing at this time (think massive endowment monies at high profile private universities) Finally, there is no discussion of the quality of the grant proposals. Could it possibly be researchers are getting denied because their research isn't all that good??

As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I applaud the efforts of Dr. Faust's. The Bush administration and NIH have obliterated funding for BASIC research in biomedical fields, neurosciences, and humanities. They argue that anything without a 'human application' cannot get funded. But new discoveries cannot be made without the groundwork of past publications. The logic is completely flawed and it is driving our universities and students away from academia. The strength and future of this nation was in its tolerance - personal and academic. While the rest of the world (ie. Europe, China) are making advances, we, the richest nation in the world, are being send back to the Dark Ages to fumble around with candle sticks.

Please stop the ignorance.
There are only a handful of private universities with massive endowments, they don't fund academia in the USA anyway! The NIH does fulfill this role. There is no question that the research proposals are good......its the fact there is no increase in funding. Other countries will blow ahead of us if we don't act. It's happing now actually.
The article is straightforward and based on facts.

A researchers FIRST grant has now been pushed back to on average....42 years of age. This means that a researcher has to wait till middle age now in order to even start an academic position. This also doesn't imply future success or funding.

Who wants to start a career that involves massive amounts of hours, low pay, an extremely long education and training process (decades) followed by no academic freedom due to no grant support?

The best minds will find other paths.

I think more people need to contemplate what is happening in the rest of the world. With the internet everyone can learn what we are learning. Our competitive edge will be to stay ahead of the curve by encouraging education and research. Although this story is one-sided, it is the side that needs to be heard.

The article is extremely one-sided. Are there any young bio-medical scientists at the hearing or quoted in the article? The facts are that the large academic medical centers are exploiting L1, J1, and H1-b visas to bring in foreign talent, while it pushes the young American scientist out the door.

Its painful to read.
The wealthiest university on earth is whining because it can't get even more money from the taxpayers. Why not a call for Harvard to open its own coffers.

As a biomedical researcher, this article is fairly accurate. "The side of the parties doing the granting" is the NIH itself, which is loosing it's funding and has voiced its concerns before; that is why this article was written in the first place. I am considering the notion of backing out of the Neuroscience doctoral program I applied to as I fear that there won't be enough jobs available when I get out unless I move to Europe where they give more adequate funding to medical sciences. I didn't say "ideal funding," I just said it's more adequate there than it is here. It's truly sad that our country is about to face the biggest medical dilemma the world has ever seen, the Baby Boomer retirement, and yet we are cutting funds to our medical research institutions and nursing schools. Our country is ran by fools.

Funding for all research is TIGHT now. I was working on a research project for the department of defense, and we were told time and again that we may not get our project contract renewed because, despite the fact that our research was very important to the agency we were working for, federal funding is severely limited. Departments and agencies have tight budgets now and have to pick and choose on priorities, and that hurts research.

I stopped my portion of the research project and took a corporate job. I can't have limited funding and threats of no funding put my wife and me on the street. Industry seems to be moving along just fine for now, even with an economic decline, so competing for federal funding these days is less desirable and unstable.

Lack of government grants has hurt research all across the spectrum. Having worked on a government project I realize how little grant money there really is to go around. Brilliant projects are being dropped because of lack of funding. I entirely agree with this article.

As a researcher at a public university I can attest that the article above is quite accurate. For me, the issues with funding aren't limited to the awarding of money for new research though. What's really pressing are the pathetic wages paid to the technicians that do all the work. Universities can't compete with industry at that level and as a result, there are fewer and fewer "career technicians." Everyone I've known in the field can only take about 2 years in any lab before it's too overwhelming.

I won't be in the field much longer, regardless of what the next budget cycles look like. More money will always mean simply more science (not always better science). It never equates to better wages. I'm tired of busting my hump looking for HIV drug targets only to live below the poverty line for the rest of my life.

Ummm, what about the soaring cost of a college education. Rather than building glorious edifices on campus why don't you fund research?

What about all the gifted, future scientists that can't afford college any longer? Sure the colleges will give you loans, at a high rate, with high fees, and bank kickbacks so you too can become part of the educated and indentured class.

Harvard is swimming in endowment money and they’re still trying to use the “it’s for the children” cry to dip further into the public trough.

College costs have far out paced inflation and if they were a mutual fund would be among the top money earners.

Although I'm all for doing research, I'm also getting tired of seeing headlines like "If both parents have Alzheimer's, your risk soars." Smoking is bad too? You don't say?

WVW unfortunately doesn’t understand how the granting process happens. All of the money allocated for grants is being awarded. None of it is sitting idle waiting for a good enough proposal to come along.

The problem is, even if you award all the funds, there simply isn’t enough to go around to all the deserving researchers.

As for the richest universities, the scientists there represent only a tiny fraction of the number practicing in the entire country. It is these other scientists whose work is suffering. Modern research is incredibly expensive to undertake; realistically, no one but the federal government has sufficient resources to underwrite it.

In response to WVW: I was an assistant professor at an Ivy League university and have chosen to leave academic research for reasons related to this article. One excellent point is the conflict that arises when the junior faculty must compete for dollars that once went to their adviser or mentor. It creates a hostile environment.
1. Endowment money does not reach young faculty members. Gifts have been given to universities for specific purposes. The universities do not have the authority to redirect those funds in any way they like, even for such pressing needs as repairs to the buildings and infrastructure.
2. It is hard to believe that the quality of the research being performed in this country has fallen so fast and so quickly as you hypothesize (i.e. 12% funding of grants vs. 29% funding when measured 7 or 8 years apart).

Excellent comment WVW. Without more info, all context is lost. Are the 12 (only 12?) junior faculty Faust et al interviewed at public or private, large or small institutions? Have these faculty members / researchers applied for and been denied grant money themselves? What were the six universities? What specfifically is "Partners Healthcare"? What will Kennedy's committee do with this information? It is difficult to draw any meaningful, contextual conclusion from this article.

Back at the start of the Iraq war the disadvantaged people of this country lost their funding to pay for the war effort. When they complained they were told they were cowardlfy unpartroitic traitors. Drew Gilpin Faust now proves herself proves herself to be a cowardlfy unpatriotic traitor. Anne Giersch proves herself to be a cowardly unpatriotic traitor. And anyone else who complains about lower science research federal funding proves themselves to be a cowardly unpatriotic traitor.

James

This is an interesting article. My perspective, as a young scientist, is that the system is at a crossroads right now. Young scientists have a very difficult time getting their first funding, because they have no track record of successfully using funding. At the same time, established investigators are being cut back in their number of grants. Young scientists are forced to compete against second and third grants from much older scientists, and the deck is stacked in the favor of the older scientists. Many young academic scientists are leaving academic science because of failure to achieve their first grant, or failure to renew it. This number is far higher than it has been in decades. To get to WVW's point, yes, without question, the proposals being funded now are far more competitive than the ones funded five years ago. But equally without question, when you supply more research money, you get more research output. The academic enterprise has reacted. The number of new faculty hired in biomedical research has plummeted. Young faculty who cannot get funding are being denied tenure - effectively fired - at historic rates. The new faculty are the ones trained in, and that can expand in, new directions of research - innovation - technology - discovery. Researchers in the European Union used to look at migration to the USA as a mark of excellence. Now they laugh at the concept, because it is so much easier to get research funding there. Young scientists who used to immigrate to the USA are now in inverse immigration. They are heading back to China and Japan and Europe in much larger numbers, as the historic USA brain-sink turns into a brain-drain because other nations fund research more readily. The contributions of research to IP and economic success of nations have been profiled before and are not insignificant, but the rising tide of IP is moving to other nations. The top journal slots, also, have a decreasing fraction of their slots for US based labs. One of our strengths, as a nation, is about to be a non-strength, and we will all be the worse for it. All of these trends have been quantified in scientific journals in recent years. If we do not spend more money on research, we will not be research leaders, and we will not reap the rewards of being research leaders.

The government and private funding sources like Bill Gates don't understand the importance of the accident, the brains behind many inventions and scientific discoveries. We have to let bright young scientist kick ideas around without having to enter a monastery.

Endowment funds and private organizations such as the Alzheimer's Foundation, Rett Syndrome Res. Foundation, Autism Research Foundation, Whitehall Institute, etc. provide limited funds that are even more competitive than NIH funding. We are truly at a low time now in our research efforts and as Professor at a major University, we are seeing fewer and fewer American graduate students pursuing Ph.D.s. In addition the funding is so bad that now only 1 in maybe 15 really good ideas are funded. It is discouraging and the United States will no longer be the premier place for biomedical research. This story is right on the mark. NIH grants are the gold standard for everything from promotion to tenure and as our research scientists begin to age we will be in short supply very soon.

what a dumb comment. It says that the amount of funding is going down, not they are rejecting grants. It has nothing to do with the quality of the research. The people in congress approving the money don't understand the reseach they are giving the money too. Their inability to provide funding to the people who provide grant money could not have less to do with the quality of research. This is where our money should be going, not to far less important endeavors like unnecessary conflicts.

Many funding foundations and agencies refuse to support lone scientists, even if highly innovative. Innovators are most apt to come up with ideas that are politically incorrect, and funding sources tend to support politically correct research. Claude Bernard warned that progress depends more on ideas than experimental results, an insight lost on our generation. Loren Eiseley and Paul Feyerabend noted that suppressing a paradigm in preference to one politically favored could permanently damage society. And Max Planck observed that advances that are simple and emanate from improbable and unexpected sources are those most likely to be resisted. Among those apt to suppress paradigm shifts are the innovators peers.
Educators and policy makers should spend more of their time reading the history of science and medicine, and less on fund raising activities.

While this is an academic's view its point should not be lost on speculation about the quality of new investigator research proposals. This takes care of itself in a peer review system (politics of study sections aside). Bottom line is that the quoted 12% funding level is actually only 6% as 1/2 of the proposal entering the NIH review system are triaged (rejected without score). New guys are expected to fight alongside 20 year veterans that have many more friends and insight into how the NIH funding system works.

When I entered my PhD. ion 1992 I was given a view that there would be a huge gap in the number of scientist come 2005 and funding would be readily available. The financial boon of the 90's fostered the endowments for facilities and many new faculty were hired to fill these buildings. Unfortunately most endowments cannot be used for ongoing funding (i.e. beyond the startup costs of a new lab). The result is a significant increase in the number of young scientists but no money in the federal government is added to support their growing numbers.

How would you feel if you spent 6 years in graduate school, 4 years in a post-doc only to find that the job you have been trained for is not viable for you to continue? Few people would accept this outcome in other occupations.

Seasoned researchers at the Ivy League institution where I work have or are in the process of taking up positions in Canada and Singapore where they can continue to be funded. These scientist were not unsuccessful; they were recruited and chose to leave. They are also American citizens, now contributing to the successful biomedical research enterprises of other countries. This requires that they also guide and train graduate students and post-docs in their new labs across the boarder and over-seas. Therefore, not only are people from other countries not being recruited here to be trained and contribute their talent and labor to NIH funded research, we are in the process of loosing US citizens who have been trained here to other countries where they are now training the afore-mentioned people who in the past would have come here to support the effort of NIH grants during their training. This makes the current funding crisis appear to be geometric rather than linear in its impact.

Science is a career that demands persistence. Good ideas don't usually fall into the petri dish that you pick up and discover penicillin. Even in such a case, as Pasteur said, luck favors the prepared mind and you have to constantly study and contemplate your research problem to be competitively productive. In order to be hired as a faculty member, the young researcher is required to have an active project that the hiring department deems likely to be funded by the NIH. In practical terms, this means that short of a miracle, there is no way for a break to exist in a young scientist’s training period that won’t imperil their career because this would result in the loss of necessary momentum on their project required to carry them onto a faculty position. Given the term of the investment the government has to make in training individuals for these positions as independent researchers, allowing the current funding crisis to occur is nothing less than the tragic lack of stewardship of a national resource. The total NIH budget is now roughly the cost of two months for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, if the latest estimates for these expenditures are correct. I am curious as to what the return on investment will be for the war in Iraq and what the total nature of the opportunity costs for this war are within and outside of the NIH budget. Budgets are about priorities and priorities reflect the values of a budget’s author.

I'm a Type 1 diabetic. That means that I wear an insulin pump ALL THE TIME. Doesn't matter what I'm doing, the pump comes along for thr ride, or the run, or whatever I do. I would love to be pump-free, but with fewer science money, I guess I just have to be stuck with it.

Maybe the article IS one-sided, but I very much find it difficult to care! I want to be a non-diabetic, and I don't much care HOW that happens! WE NEED MORE SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The nieghborhood ammo factory just expanded four times it's size with a ammo contract for the war effort. A truely patriotic courageoous effort. You research guys are just crybabies. You all need to get a job!!!

James