NIH grants not scarce for 200 researchers, Nature analysis says

At a time when government biomedical funding is flat and junior researchers are struggling to get grants, some senior scientists have been awarded a half-dozen or more federal grants each, a leading scientific journal reports -- including a Boston brain-imaging scientist.

According to tomorrow's Nature, 200 scientists won six or more grants in 2007 from the National Institutes of Health, whose budget has dropped by 13 percent since 2003 when inflation is considered. The journal's analysis included all kinds of grants, from supplemental awards to grants for arranging conferences or running training workshops.

The journal listed 22 researchers who each held eight or more grants, including Dr. Bruce Rosen of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His eight grants totaled $9.1 million, ranking him 14th.

Rosen said in an e-mail interview that senior scientists typically have broader responsibilities for large labs and centers that work with other researchers throughout the world. He has only one individual investigator grant in his portfolio, for work on stroke recovery. Two more are training grants and three others are collaborative grants across several institutions where he acts as scientific coordinator. On two other large grants, he said he acts as the "scientific 'glue' between projects."

"It is a time of great difficulty, in my own experience not seen since the mid-late '80's," he said. "In our own lab I've begun to see very promising young scientists choosing careers in business consulting rather than research positions, and am facing the very real possibility for the first time in a very long while of watching good scientists potentially lose their jobs for lack of support. This is obviously devastating for the individuals involved, and very dispiriting to the community of their peers who see themselves sometimes only a small step ahead."

The scarcity of research dollars amid flat federal funding has brought scrutiny to how grants are awarded. Last month an advisory panel to the NIH peer-review process recommended that researchers spend at least 20 percent of their time on any one project funded by a grant, meaning no researcher could get more than five grants, the Nature article says. NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni told Nature he wants to limit the number of grants per researcher to even the scales between haves and have-nots.

Rosen said establishing a norm for the number of grants per investigator would be a good idea, as long as scientists could ask for an extra grant to bring a multidisciplinary group together and get a hearing from fellow scientists on the idea.

"It might not be fair to leave readers with the impression that ... these 'big grant getters' are really simply hogging money that should go to others," he said. "Like myself, I suspect that many or most are in fact providing exactly the kind of research opportunities envisioned by the NIH for a broad variety of research and researchers."