Peer review is a system that issues rewards before the game begins.
The outcome is grousing by scientists who don’t get rewards, aka grants, and widespread suspicions that winners craftily manipulated the system. In the best of times, demand exceeds the supply of grant money. But when the imbalance is stark, as it is now, moods turn glum, dark suspicions flourish, and trumpets sound for reforming the peer-review system.
The National Institutes of Health, the world’s colossus for reviewing research applications and awarding research money, has just come through a long and strenuous reform effort for peer review, with paltry results. Allowance must be given for the possibility that, if implemented, some improvements may ensue. But don’t look for biomedical nirvana. (“NIH Offers Huge Increase in Money for Some Grant Reviewers,” Chronicle.com June 6.)
Sure, as proposed, shorter research applications are preferable to longer ones, and financial bonuses for top-flight reviewers might raise the level of review talent. Also commendable, and in spirit with the political times, are special kitties for “transformative” research and further efforts to assist young researchers onto long-term career paths.
But the prescribed changes are mostly minor and irrelevant to the basic problem, which is beyond the reach of NIH management: There’s not enough money for the legions of well-qualified researchers seeking NIH’s largess. Pains from the dearth of money are felt throughout the entire biomedical-research enterprise. The young feel neglected and discouraged by their poor showing in grants competition with senior scientists; and taking on the heavy burdens of reviewing long, complex proposals seems pointless when worthy projects are rejected for lack of money. Meanwhile, Congress wants medical miracles to pour out of its favorite research agency, and the legislators wonder why the doubling of the NIH budget, to $29-billion between 1998 and 2003, has produced uninterrupted whining about the need for still more.
This is not the time for big changes in agency management. With a new president and administration arriving in little over seven months, Washington is braking to a halt. On Inauguration Day, new administrations and their agency heads routinely call a halt to any inherited ongoing changes while they review programs and policies. With his road map for speeding science to the bedside, and now reforms for peer review, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni has given the stolid Bethesda bureaucracy about as much upset as it can endure. Perhaps that’s why a timetable of 18 months is proposed for implementing what are, after all, relatively simple managerial changes. A lot of people at NIH would like to revert to the old days, when basic, undirected, investigator-initiated basic research was king and transformative research was someone else’s business.
Zerhouni’s appointment is not time-limited, and he has not stated his own plans. But if the next president wants his own choice in the post, Zerhouni will go. Possibly awaiting him, says the grapevine, is the presidency at his former place of employment, Johns Hopkins University.
The peer-review reforms are not likely to conflict with whatever administration takes office in January. But the real problem for NIH is a budget that has remained almost unchanged for five years, resulting in a big dip in purchasing power. The corrective for the money problem is in the hands of Congress and the White House.
