The issue is dire but not new: Following the doubling of the National Institutes of Health’s budget, from 1998 to 2003, biomedical researchers have fallen on hard times. As the budget has leveled off, researchers’ chances of getting a grant have dropped steeply, as have the chances of getting jobs for the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows whose training was financed by the richer budgets around the turn of the century.

Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, analyzes the trends and suggests some possible solutions in the new issue of Science. He proposes that the NIH convene an advisory committee to find strategies to even out the roller coaster of research grants. The committee, he writes, could consider moves like:

Aligning the number of graduate students and postdocs with the job market instead of with the NIH budget, perhaps by allowing NIH funds to support staff positions rather than temporary trainees, or by limiting the number of visas for foreign students and postdocs.

Finding new ways of managing NIH budget increases that result in more stability, perhaps by aiming for steady NIH growth instead of boom-and-bust cycles, or by allowing grantee institutions to reserve funds for lean years.

—Lila Guterman