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发帖数: 283 | 1 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6179/24.full
Chasing the Money
Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
As constraints take hold in biomedicine, scientists are forced to adapt.
Money. It is what fuels research, and these days, it's almost all biomedical
scientists in the United States can talk about.
They've been buffeted by funding swings at the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), their field's primary benefactor. And now they're anxious about the
future, as Congress tries to rein in debt by slowing government spending.
One result: Morale is as low and uncertainty as high as she's ever seen it,
says molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman, president emerita of Princeton
University. "The image that comes into my head is a seesaw," she says. "The
highs are higher and the lows are lower."
Not everyone is teetering. Some researchers and universities are raking in
record-setting sums, in part by aggressively diversifying their funding
sources (Science, 21 June 2013, p. 1394). But the triumphs only underscore a
dominant theme: The U.S. funding landscape is shifting. And with change
comes adaptation.
For this special package, Science explored how biomedical research at U.S.
universities—a $32 billion enterprise that involves hundreds of thousands
of people—is reshaping itself. We found a complex mosaic, captured in the
profiles that follow. To put them in context, it helps to examine what the
hard data can—and can't—tell us about what's really happening on the
ground.
What we know
Over the past 20 years, federal investment in R&D as a share of the gross
domestic product has fluctuated above and below 1%, and now stands a bit
under it. Biology has long been a favored child of funders, its allure
growing with time. Today, roughly two-thirds of federal R&D money at
universities goes to the life sciences, about 10% more than in the early
1970s. Industry spending also increased in the 1980s and 1990s, and now
provides about 7% of the R&D dollars that flow to universities.
At the same time, NIH's budget has sustained wild swings that many
economists say make for an inefficient research enterprise. Between 1998 and
2003, the agency's budget doubled, from less than $14 billion to more than
$27 billion. For the next 5 years it stayed largely flat. Then came an
infusion of $10.4 billion in 2009, part of the federal stimulus plan to
fight the recession—followed by a sizable bump downward in 2013, a 5%
across-the-board cut from the sequester.
Universities responded predictably to the budget doubling: They expanded,
adding new buildings and filling them with staff members and trainees, who
needed money of their own to thrive. In 2002, a commentary in Science
suggested that biomedical researchers had become dependent on annual budget
increases of at least 6% (24 May, p. 1401). But that didn't happen. "[T]he
fundamental problems are structural in nature," concluded Michael Teitelbaum
of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City 6 years later (Science,
1 August 2008, p. 644). "[B]iomedical research funding is both erratic and
subject to positive-feedback loops that together drive the system
ineluctably toward damaging instability."
That instability is now on vivid display. On the one hand, the future looks
a tad brighter: NIH's 2014 budget increased 3.5%, to $30 billion. But that
will likely not be enough to sustain the community as it hopes. NIH's grant
approval rate dropped below 17% last year, compared with about 30% in the
late 1990s, and the average size of standard research grants fell for the
first time in recent memory.
What it all means
Some say the endless complaints about money are a bit much: After all, NIH
is still the biggest funder of biomedical research in the world.
Universities and other institutions kick in another $7 billion from various
sources to support their biology researchers.
But inflation is taking a bite. In 2013, the NIH budget of $29.15 billion
was, when adjusted for inflation, almost $5 billion less than the $27.17
billion available in 2003. And some economists argue the losses are even
greater, because the cost of gene sequencers, supercomputers, and even mice
usually rise faster than the general rate of inflation.
The funding swings have also exposed a mismatch between how the government
supports biomedical research—one fiscal year at a time—and how science is
practiced—incrementally, with progress measured in years or even decades.
Because NIH now approves less than one in five grant applications,
scientists say they are spending more of their time submitting proposals—
leaving less for the research needed to win grants in the first place.
What we don't know
It's "appalling how little is known" about how the community is adjusting to
these pressures, says Julia Lane, an economist at the American Institutes
for Research in Washington, D.C. Are young investigators suffering more than
established ones? Are smaller labs contracting more than larger ones? Which
fields of research are most affected? "You have these major adjustments,
and it's shocking that there is no method of understanding what the impacts
are," Lane adds. "The science agencies are charged with building,
identifying, and funding the best science. They don't have as their mandate
to answer these questions." Dark rumors abound, fueling the sense of unease.
For NIH, the knowledge gap can hamper its decision-making. The agency makes
it easier for new investigators to get funding, for example, but it doesn't
know how they fare 5 years out, when their first big grant is up for renewal
. "We want to make sure we're not setting them up for failure," says Sally
Rockey, NIH's deputy director for extramural research. The agency plans to
start tracking these people, to gauge whether they're headed for dire
straits.
Also hotly debated is whether NIH should scale back support for the 1600 or
so "millionaires," the principal investigators who boast more than $1.5
million a year in grant money. NIH gives their proposals extra review, but
in most cases offers additional support with peer reviewers' blessings, "
because," Rockey says, "we're a meritocracy." Jeremy Berg, a former NIH
institute director who's now at the University of Pittsburgh, recently found
that more than 80% of those who already receive about $650,000 a year in
direct support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute also get money from
NIH—an average of two grants each, or roughly another $400,000 a year. (
This funding does not include so-called indirect costs, which allows the
institution to cover overhead.) "Should we be supporting a smaller number of
investigators but at a very rich rate," Tilghman wonders, "or should we be
letting 100 flowers bloom?"
Economists are trying to answer some of these questions (see Policy Forum, p
. 41). At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Maryann Feldman is
poring over records from nine universities to understand how the support
that labs receive influences publications, patents, and researcher
characteristics. Feldman is also studying "venture philanthropy," which
applies businesslike goals to charity work, to see how academics are relying
on it and whether it redirects their research. At Ohio State University,
Columbus, economist Bruce Weinberg is exploring how the structure of a lab
and its funding shape the training of graduate students and postdocs and
their professional future. "Hopefully the data will be built" to show how
the community is adjusting, Weinberg says. "But it's not there yet."
Some suggest a rethinking of the entire enterprise. "I think for a long time
people in biomedical science bought into what you hear in industry, which
is, 'If you don't grow, you die,' " Tilghman says. "And it's not true, it's
absolutely not true." Maybe, she suggests, scientists and their institutions
should question whether they are well served by ever-expanding labs,
flanked by construction cranes building still more facilities.
The end result for some senior scientists right now is caution: Play it safe
, tighten your belt. That could have a trickle-down effect to the mouths
they help feed. "I cannot take a grad student and make a 5- to 6-year
commitment," says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. "I don't know
where we're going to be in 5 or 6 years." |
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