Doubling Down on NIH Funding

This week’s Policy Forum (subscription) in Science addresses the “structural disequilibria” in biomedical research that has resulted from the recent funding history of the National Institutes of Health. Addressing these problems would create a more hospitable career path for young researchers and yield more medical advances. Michael S. Teitelbaum begins the piece with details on the increasing difficulty for young researchers to obtain grants, a topic Sheril Kirshenbaum tackled in an article on the “Plight of the Postdoc”:

In 1998, about 32% of NIH competing Research Project Grant applications were successful; by 2007 the comparable success rate had declined to 21%. The percentage of NIH awardees aged 40 or under, already less than 23% in 1998, declined to just over 15% by 2005. Some of the reasons are well understood: First, adjusting for inflation, the value of the NIH budget has declined by about 13% from its peak in 2003. Second, the rapid annual increases from 1998 to 2003 were followed by 5 years of small annual decreases.

But Teitelbaum points out that the number of applications each year for grants has nearly doubled in the last ten years, due to the strengthening of the scientific research core as a whole between 1998 to 2003, when NIH funding was increased by 6 percent annually. He also argues that “when the increases from 2003 onward proved to be smaller than 6%,” the government undercut the benefits of the original increases. “In financial terms,” he writes, “one might say that the system became more highly leveraged, rendering it more vulnerable to unanticipated downward deflection of the increase in federal research funds.”

The article points out that this vulnerability may be due to the unique characteristics of the scientific job market: In many fields, when the demand or salary for a particular job decreases, so does the number of graduates seeking the job. Biomedical research does not follow this ebb-and-flow pattern, in part because international scientists can fill the slots. Moreover, some instability in funding streams results from use of NIH grant funds to pay for medical research facilities built on credit, as well as use of grant funds to pay for professor salaries.

Therefore, Teitelbaum argues that the problems at the NIH face are fundamentally “structural in nature” and “can be addressed only at the level of policy and administrative practice by the Congress and NIH itself.” He suggests that the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research could convene a panel to craft policies that would smooth out funding policies to counteract this vulnerability to boom-and-bust cycles.

He also acknowledges that “it may be possible to create broad political support for large annual NIH funding increases into the indefinite future.” CAP Senior Fellow and Science Progress adviser Tom Kalil has argued that Congress should again double the NIH budget by increasing funding 10 percent each year for ten years. Better oversight of internal funding decisions to counteract these “structural disequilibria” would only make that funding work harder for scientists and the American people.

Tags: funding, NIH

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