NIH is again handwringing that for lack of money it shortchanges young scientists in favor of well-established researchers and tends to caution and conservatism in selecting research projects. Ho-hum. All true. It’s a chronic condition in the elephantine bureaucracy that handles the world’s biggest wad of biomedical research money.
The same lamentations were voiced prior to Congress putting the NIH budget on a fast track to doubling, to $27 billion, between 1998 and 2003. As the budget swelled, the Willie Sutton imperative quickly produced a near-doubling of grant applications. Then Congress throttled back on the money, parceling out only smallish increases, or none at all, leaving today’s purchasing power at NIH down about 8 percent below the 2004 level. As a result, the success rate for applicants has dropped from one in three in 2001 to one in five at present, according to a report in the December 7 Chronicle by Jeffrey Brainard.
So, familiar cries have again gone up about neglect of the young in favor of the grant-savvy and experienced elders of science, along with risk avoidance in picking projects. A big study aimed at remedying the situation has been under way at NIH for some time, and a report is soon due. Hope should not be ruled out, but given past performance, don’t count on it. NIH has previously grappled with these difficulties many times, with negligible results, mainly trivial set-asides of grant money for first-time applicants and toothless exhortations about the need to gamble on risky research that might produce big breakthroughs.
Though youth is routinely lauded as the cutting edge of science, the average age for first-time receipt of an NIH grant is over 40. Several years ago, while I was researching the onward march of gerontocracy in biomedical research, Bruce Alberts, a molecular biologist who was then President of the National Academy of Sciences, told me the youth shortage is “a disaster for the future of science, because nobody can count on the young people if they are going to have to wait till they’re 40 for their own ideas to be tested. And even more broadly, it’s a great damper on innovation, because by the time you’re 40, you’re not going to be very innovative.”
Alberts added that “left unguided, you end up with a system that doesn’t work well. All the old people get all the money from the federal government . . . and all the labs will be huge, where the old people get the money and the young people have to go and work in an environment, a lab of 50 people, in order to get support.”
NIH Director Elias Zerhouni recently expressed determination to correct the youth deficit, but the record is strewn with similar vows in the past by Zerhouni and others. In 2005, Zerhouni described the problem “as the one thing that keeps me up at night.”
Mandating a hefty share of grant money for young scientists would directly deal with the persistent, lopsided distribution of NIH research money, but the elders of the profession dominate the politics of science and are not inclined to sacrifice their grants for the next generation of researchers.
The problem of conservatism in awarding research money is similarly intractable, given a natural caution that infests the panels that scrutinize grant applications. The reviewer who says, “Hey, this looks nutty but it might work,” is in conflict with a tradition-bound system that strongly values caution in awarding scarce research money. The folklore of science says that the surest route to success in obtaining a grant is to state a hypothesis for which bountiful data are already in hand.
Is there a way out of the youth dilemma and the timidity issue? Not if the present system is subjected to mere tinkering. But lets consider a long-shot experiment in grant management. Since, the difference between many winners and losers in the crowded grants derby is said to be nonexistent, why not put a respectable share of applications deemed minimally worthy, from young and old, in a pool and select winners by lottery? As an antidote to conservatism, mix in with them a good number of far-out proposals.
Award grants to the lottery winners, wait five years, and then see what they’ve accomplished.
Considering the lamentations that routinely come from Bethesda, the outcome couldn’t be worse than what we’ve got today.
