Slow, steady, sustainable

by emptypockets

A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece here called "So what's wrong with doubling the NSF budget anyway?," where I argued that plans to double the National Science Foundation's budget through Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative made for bad policy. I gave three reasons: first, I thought it was political posturing with no action behind it; second, I thought it was a "pro-science" front used to cover up lack of funding for NIH; and third, I said that Clinton's NIH budget doubling had shown that rapid, unsustainable funding bursts create boom-and-bust cycles that, in the long run, hurt science, and that sound policy calls for slow, steady, sustainable growth. That last item bears repeating and, fortunately, a column on Science magazine's web site last week makes the point again for me:

Between 1998 and 2003, the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) rose from $13 billion to more than $27 billion in a plan known as "the doubling." Now that the tsunami of cash has receded, many life scientists--especially those in the early phase of their careers--have found conditions no better, and in some ways worse, than before the process began. [...]

The NIH doubling did do a lot of good, providing billions of dollars for basic and clinical research and establishing a new, much higher baseline for funding. Still, "both the way Congress has expanded the NIH budget and the way NIH has made use of its new funds offer important cautionary lessons," writes Yuval Levin, a former associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, in an article in The New Atlantis. He writes that the infusion of money was "far too rapid, and not adequately tied to structural reforms that might enable NIH to best make use of its growing resources." Fifteen percent hikes for each of 5 years "built expectations and momentum that set the agency up for disappointment when the doubling was done," he writes.

The Science column links to a study by Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University (PDF of PowerPoint slides) that puts some numbers on exactly how the doubling affected young scientists. I'll post some of the key charts below, but the bottom line is essentially what I'd noticed as I watch post-docs go out looking for jobs and young faculty starting up their labs. The NIH budget doubled for five years, then was cut or held flat for five years. The first phase created a lot of new lab space that was filled by scientists who now can't get grant money to fund their young labs. We're left with a decade's worth of graduate students and post-docs who see academic science as an unstable career path.

The solution? Congress should put aside politically symbolic budget doublings and pass legislation that commits to a couple of decades of slow, steady, sustainable increases in NIH funding at levels slightly higher than inflation.

Here are a few of the charts from Stephan's presentation that I found especially useful. The presentation is almost entirely charts about demographics and budgets, and is worth flipping through for those of you who like your policy data to be quantitative.

This chart shows the NIH budget, in current dollars (blue) and constant dollars (green) over the last 30 years. Note the five-year doubling from 1998 to 2003, and the flat-line in current dollars and drop-off in inflation-adjusted dollars that we've had since 2003.

The next table I want to cite is a chart on the PowerPoint slides that I'll just blockquote here. It explains how the NIH doubling affected hiring of junior scientists. Note especially the last point.

New Construction

NSF reports greatest number of institutions began construction in fields of biological and medical sciences in FY2002 or FY2003.

56% of newly constructed space to be used for these 2 fields

Appears to be good news for early career biomedical scientists

Age of first assistantship [assistant professor position] fell for first time in 2003

Jobs on an increase (or were). But SDR [Survey of Doctorate Recipients] data is already out of date

The pickup was relatively modest for the young. Even in the best of times fewer than one-in seven of young biomedical PhDs have an academic appointment (tenure-track or non-tenure track).

Hiring was concentrated in non-tenure track positions.

The pickup that occurred was fueled in part by new buildings coming on line which in turn were fueled by NIH budget growth. Lagged the doubling.

That's the good news: the doubling fuels biology growth, and more lab space and assistant professorship positions are created, and it's easier to get a job. Here comes the bad news. Look at what happens to grant funding once the doubling stops and NIH budget gets choked off. The purple bars are the number of scientists submitting grant applications, the blue bars are the number of applicants getting funded, and the green line is the ratio (the percent of applicants who get funded). It's important to remember the difference between applications and applicants -- the chart here represents actual scientists, who may have each submitted multiple applications. The ones who didn't get funded may find themselves S.O.L. in keeping their labs running. Note that most of the drop-off in success rate comes from the increase in new scientists applying for grants.

Finally, here's a chart showing which scientists are getting rejected. Each stacked bar is the number of grants funded by year, and it's made up of a purple segment representing new investigators (those getting funds as they are just setting up their labs) and a blue segment representing established scientists (who have a solid track record and probably are getting multiple grants funded). Note especially the green line showing that the NIH is funding fewer young scientists with independent grants than at any time in the last four decades. So you've just become an assistant professor, you've got your lab, you're hiring people for the first time, taking on students -- and you're already finding yourself in a funding crisis wondering if you're going to be able to keep the doors open.

It is foolish policy to pour resources into something for five years, and then starve it for five years. You not only waste the potential growth of the second five years, but you waste a good deal of your investment the first five years as well. Much of the funding that was poured into the NIH between 1998 and 2003 will be a loss as those research projects are put in the freezer and those young scientist trainees leave science.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Congress should commit to slow, steady, sustainable funding of NIH and other science agencies on a time scale of decades. It's the best policy for science, and the best investment of the public dollar.

Comments

[David Dobbs]

Well done and well said. Your take-home -- "It is foolish policy to pour resources into something for five years, and then starve it for five years." hits the nail on the head. The surge in funding helped create an awful lot of good work from the NIH. Many good labs, including some that have made major breakthroughs about the underpinnings of pain and conditions as serious and widespread as MS and depression, are now starved for funds and/or losing some of the best people. One lab I know that made great strides in fundamentals of myelination learned in June that it would receive no more funds for the year -- funds that had already been requested, budgeted, promised, and supposedly good as gold. Their plans are now in disarray and the research program severely compromised, with researchers looking for work elsewhere etc. Precisely the disastrous effect you allude to in your take-home sentence above.

[calugg]

It plays roller derby with researchers' lives. Securing federal grants has become the "gold standard" for scientists at research extensive universities--if they wish to recieve tenure.

But if the money dries up but the expectations for P&T don't (and the latter are notoriously slow to change), it's a disaster for junior faculty, and can be a career stall-er for senior faculty. To receive a string of federal grants and then to get nothing ... evaluators might read that professional history as "something went wrong" with the scholar in question.

To some extent, particularly at the junior level, academe is like the military: You're either UP the promotion ladder OR you're OUT. So, the funding games in DC have real impacts on science and the lives of science. Empty pockets is correct: slow and steady funding growth promotes both good science and helps to build and sustain our scientific research infrastructure.

[Boston1775]

I would imagine I am not alone in wondering what to do with a sophomore in college who has always been interested in business and science. Hmmm, which way to steer; our family is firm in making sure that the basics of mortgage, marriage and children are covered by his career choice.

[emptypockets]

Boston1775, trick answer but I say steer him towards business: If he allows himself to be steered, he'll do better in the private sector; if he insists on finding his own way, he'll make an outstanding scientist. :)

[kim]

My impression is that science has changed over the past years from an enterprise that developed the young careers of individual scientists to a more businesslike team-oriented activity that primarily benefits the relatively few PIs and the bigger universities, the increased funding for NIH prior to Bush primarily went to the most selfish/successful hogs and was only peripherally meant for young scientists (your last graph pretty much confirms this).

[P J Evans]

It reminds me of why my father advised against goig into defense work: lack of security. He went through the boom/bust cycles of the 70s (fortunately toward the end of his career, but it was rough living through it).

[emptypockets]

kim, NIH has been fairly clear recently on this agenda, particularly under its current director: they want to move biomedical research toward Big Science, done with large per-project budgets highly collaboratively by large teams, more like the model of experimental physics. Biology is just getting to an age, imo, where this is possible, and it's a real policy decision that needs to be made. For example one of the big-budget proposals from recent years was to sequence the complete genomes of many cancers, to get a whole-genome unbiased picture of what mutations are associated with different types of cancer. It's a very expensive endeavour and experts can reasonably disagree on whether it's a good experiment and what we're likely to learn. To me personally, if it comes at the cost of many many Small Science projects, done independently in diverse areas on basic questions by small groups of students and post-docs, it's not worth it -- I prefer to put my eggs in more baskets, to fund experiments less likely to overlap with where industrial investment is going, and to fund work that also results in the best training for the next generation of young scientists.

But you're totally right that the last decade has seen the emergence of strong advocates for a shift toward Big Science done by large, collaborative publicly funded teams (like the human genome sequencing project). I think this is primarily the result not of political changes but of changes in the scale of what's technologically possible in biology.

[Boston1775]

emptypockets, clever answer, but we have scientists in the family. My youngest nephew is headed toward neuroscience and longs to be in a lab. I'm simply saying that being underpaid, burnt out and in a strained relationship is poor quality of life, that's all.

[Boston1775]

As a matter of fact my cousin was doing research at Harvard and nearly cracked under the pressure. He's a quiet, brilliant guy who could not handle the cut throat competition.

[emptypockets]

being underpaid, burnt out and in a strained relationship is poor quality of life

you mean, there's another choice? :)
I guess my second piece of advice would be, don't take advice from someone whose "quality of life" includes writing blog posts at 3 am...

there's a lot to be said against going into science. as you know, you shouldn't do it for the money (there isn't much) or the glory (even less). but you do get paid to play around and tinker creatively all day, and if you can scrape by financially and avoid competition enough to stay focused as much as possible on your own internal sense of success (something science has in common with blogging, imo), then it has its own eccentric rewards.

[Assissotom]

That was a very nice post, I’m proud of you!