Greg Petsko, who works on protein structure at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, writes a monthly comment in
Genome Biology. One month it's about
the dog genome and the next month it's about
banning the use of supplementary materials. (Sorry: all articles require a subscription.) I really love his style. Here's an excerpt:
But the category that I want to discuss here isn't any of these. It's the one that gets my blood boiling every time I think about it: 'things I really didn't want any part of but got anyway'. George W Bush. Reality TV. The war in Iraq. Male pattern baldness. And of course, supplementary material.
This month, however, he tackles dwindling funding for NIH research. The situation is dire, but he does pledge to write next month about how to fix it.
Here are some excerpts.
When a scientist doing work in genomics, or cell biology, or biochemistry, or immunology submits a grant proposal to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest supporter of life science research in the world, his or her chance of it being funded are at historic lows.(...)
Thanks to the war in Iraq and tax cuts mostly for the richest Americans, federal funding for life science research, which doubled over a seven year period not long ago, has remained flat in real dollars and declined in inflation-adjusted dollars during the last few years.(...)
I personally know of many young research students who are either going into industry or leaving science altogether because they believe that they have little possibility of being able to obtain funding were they to set up their own laboratory. And I know of an equal number of senior scientists who are going into administration or taking early retirement, not because they want to, but because they have become discouraged about the prospects for continued support.
(A lengthy discussion of the grant review process is spliced out like an intron. By the way, if you do follow the link, you should be aware that GU-AG is not 100% conserved. It's only about 99% or so. That difference means the world to me.)
Ten years ago, (...)[r]eviewers tried hard to find reasons to support work, particularly by young investigators, and their comments were often encouraging and guiding. (...) Not any more. (...) When the percentile cut-off is around 10%, reviewers are being asked to do the impossible. They have to make choices from among research proposals that they themselves have evaluated as being better than 90% of all other grants in the field. No human being can make objective distinctions between grants at that level of quality. (...) Increasingly silly criteria are being used to distinguish between applications: one of my proposals lost points because I did not give enough detail about how I was planning to carry out a particular experimental technique. Forgive me if I was a trifle starry-eyed about it, but I really didn't think I needed to demonstrate my competence in using a method that I had invented some fifteen years before.
Hm, reminds me of the nitpicking Craig Venter endured at the NIH before venter-ing out on his own. He brought us the first complete organismal genome, and led to the publication of the human genome years in advance. But enough jabs at the NIH. (Do you know how the Department of Energy finally convinced the NIH to get involved in the Human Genome Project? They threatened to go elsewhere and make the NIH look like fools.)
Every funded proposal now is a direct threat to one's own grants being funded. (...) Imagine how discouraging it must be to write a good proposal and see it not funded, and not to have any idea how to improve it because there's really nothing to improve. (...) But I think it's equally discouraging for the reviewers. If you're given 20 proposals to evaluate out of a crop of, say, 100, and you determine that 6 are of excellent quality, but you know that the probability that more than 2 of these will actually get funded is nil, how can you feel good about what you're doing? Or about your own prospects for getting funded? Or about the future of your profession?
Several years ago, I sent an NYT article to my Republican brother-in-law about the US losing its competitive edge in science. No reply. I used to fear that the fundamentalists would attack any research dealing with evolution. Well, why do it directly and overtly when they can launch Arm-aggedon instead and divert money to good causes like bombs, indirectly crippling science?
I too am contemplating a return to industry vs. a career in academia. I'm very worried. Granted, I'm worried in general about the state of the so-called union.