In her laboratory, Anne Giersch has a freezer filled with the inner ears of 782 mice. Locked inside that freezer could be important information about the genetics behind hearing loss. But locked is the key word. Giersch, an assistant professor at Harvard University, has twice been denied the funding to probe further.
Giersch is one of many scientists from top universities featured in a report, to be released tomorrow in Washington, which argues that flat federal funding at the National Institute of Health has clogged the research pipeline and put a generation of scientists at risk.
Giersch, 44, who wants to study gene expression in inner ears to find what goes wrong with hearing loss, made it clear that her story is not unique.
"You can't throw a rock around Harvard without hitting a scientist who is having trouble getting funding," she said.
"In the old days - the old days being five years ago - [my proposal] would have been good enough to get funding. But not anymore," she said, with palpable frustration in her voice.
Tomorrow's report, from a consortium of top universities including Harvard, Brown, and Duke, expands on a similar one released last year and articulates a broad concern that five years of flat funding at the NIH - which, with rising inflation, can be viewed as a funding decrease - is forcing scientists to downsize their laboratories and abandon innovation in favor of safer bets.
And there is a real concern that young scientists, who have witnessed their senior colleagues' struggles to get funding, will abandon research in favor of teach ing, clinical work, or the private sector.
Rachelle Gaudet, a structural biologist at Harvard, is one of the scientists who say the current NIH funding system forced her to drastically scale back on an ambitious idea. Gaudet is interested in how our bodies sense pain and temperature though the proteins on the surface of our cells. There has been much research on how chemicals affect the structure of proteins, but, when she made her first proposal to the NIH five years ago, she was hoping to do pioneering work on how something physical - like heat - can alter that structure.
Her initial proposal was to study the entire ion channel of a specific protein, the cell door that opens to allow the pain sensation in, with the hope that understanding that channel could allow for better treatments of the pain caused by inflammation. She was rejected. Four years and five iterations of the proposal later, she was finally approved for what she calls a "seriously watered down" study of pieces of that channel.
"What's ironic," she said, "is that the [most recent NIH] reviewers said that what will ultimately be most interesting is to study the structure of the entire ion channel."
Gaudet said the current NIH system forced her to compromise because ambitious and potentially risky projects that shoot for a big payoff are often overlooked in favor of safer projects that promise safer results. For the scientists who want to pursue new areas of research, it's a Catch-22.
"When you're applying for a faculty position, people want to hear big ideas," said Gaudet, who is 33. "Then when you get the position, you need to switch gears and present it to the NIH in a way that is fundable. It forces people who may be naturally innovative to be conservative, and that's bad because the time that people are often most willing and able to take risks is when they're just starting their careers."
To help combat the conundrum faced by many early career faculty, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit medical research organization, will announce today the creation of a $300 million initiative to help up to 70 young scientists bridge the gap between starting their laboratories - which is often funded by universities or one-time grants - and establishing vibrant independent research projects.
Tom Cech, a Nobel laureate and the institute's president, said that the current NIH funding climate is highly stressful and distracting.
"Here you have these people who've been in school for 30 years, they've just gotten their labs going, and instead of spending their time making discoveries in the lab or mentoring younger scientists, they spend all their time in an office writing federal grant applications. It's not a very effective use of their talent."
Gaudet said the repeated rebuffs from the NIH have had a psychological impact on her generation of scientists.
"Most of us got here because we're successful and haven't faced this sort of rejection in the past," she said, "and you can start doubting yourself. I've invested in science and I'm planning to stick around. But a lot of the grad students and postdocs are thinking of doing something else. They've seen what is happening to their peers."
The lack of funding has forced Giersch to take on more clinical work - she's also a cytogeneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, detecting and analyzing hereditary diseases and abnormalities - to support herself, which creates what she calls a "downward spiral" for her research.
"If I'm spending my time doing clinical work, I don't have any big blocks of time to do research, which makes me less competitive for grants because I don't have past productivity," she said.
Last week, Giersch submitted her third proposal to NIH, and she has her fingers crossed that this time she'll be successful. In the meantime, she says, those frozen mouse cochlea - chilling at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit - are always on the back of her mind.
"They're not doing any good to anybody in that freezer."
