Is there a feasible way out of the grant drought that currently afflicts the scientific enterprise, particularly in the health-related sciences? Sorry. There isn’t. Some ameliorative steps might be taken, but don’t forget the word “feasible.”

Insufficiency is built into the system, as was sagely noted nearly half a century ago by a wise man of science, I.I. Rabi, Nobel laureate in physics and longtime White House science adviser:

“There is something like a Parkinson’s Law that scientific activity will grow to meet any set budget and find it grossly inadequate,” Rabi said in a talk to the Israel Institute of Technology in 1963. “It is in the very nature of science that new discoveries open new fields of further activity. It is like climbing a mountain peak and seeing new landscapes not visible in the valley.”

In that early period of the American scientific buildup, Rabi addressed only one part of the problem: New scientific frontiers as the old ones are reached and explored. Today, that factor is joined by another: the rapid growth of research capacity. There are more trained people and labs out there than there’s money for financing their work. This is a standing condition in science, but it has been intensified by the high expectations that were induced by the unusually fast doubling of the budget of the National Institutes of Health, from about $13.5-billion to $27-billion, between 1998 and 2003.

A record surge of lab construction took off on campuses across the country, in anticipation of a continuing gusher of federal grant funds. In the patchwork system of science finance in the U.S., lab construction is mainly financed locally, with state and philanthropic funds, foundation grants, and other non-federal sources. Research in the labs is mainly financed by federal research agencies. Coordination between building and research is nonexistent.

As Congress poured money into NIH, grant applications nearly doubled, to 80,000 a year. Where did the growth come from? Much of it came from scientists who had given up on getting money from NIH, while many applications came from freshly minted Ph.D.‘s who were encouraged to pursue research careers by the rapid expansion of the NIH budget.

Then feeling it has done right by NIH, Congress has held the budget more or less steady since 2003, leading to a substantial loss of purchasing power and a drop off in the success rate for grant applicants. In lugubrious assessments that fill the bio-medical journals, it’s generally agreed that things have never been worse.

Salvation is not likely to come anytime soon from Capitol Hill, where the larder is bare and all domestic budgets are entangled in bitter squabbling between the thin Democratic majority and the dug-in Bush White House. Industry currently accounts for a record high 7 percent of academic research financing, but industrial support of academic R&D periodically rises and falls in line with the circumstances of industrial firms. Several major pharmaceutical firms are currently cutting back on research. Philanthropy, largely unpredictable, pays for a relatively small part of academic research.

A way out of the dearth would be to back away from the egalitarianism that underpins the federal grant system. Anyone with minimal qualifications and a lab bench is eligible to apply for research support. And though awards are supposedly based on merit, the distributive spirit in American politics somehow assures that the money gets spread around to some degree. For many years, in fact, the National Science Foundation has run a special program to upgrade the competitive condition of states that fare poorly in the grants derby—thereby producing more clamoring customers for grant support.

If the intent of federal support is to get the science done, then money should be concentrated in research centers and individuals with track records for high scientific productivity — and let the rest fend for themselves. The U.K. follows that principle in allocating its academic research funds, with outstanding results from sums that are minuscule by American standards.

Cruel selectivity could extract more good science from the available budgets — which, after all, are huge by the standards of any other nation. But along with most other largess coming out of Washington, money for science gets spread around. There are ways to do better. But they’re not feasible.