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发帖数: 13 | 1 Iceberg Alert for NIH
Henry R. Bourne and Mark O. Lively
Henry R. Bourne is professor emeritus in the Department of Cellular and
Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco. E-
mail: b****[email protected].
Mark O. Lively is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Wake
Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC. E-mail: m*****[email protected].
A century ago, the unsinkable Titanic charged into a moonless night, full
steam ahead. Today, unless it changes course to escape its own icebergs, the
U.S. biomedical research enterprise hurtles toward a similar doom. The
fiscal year 2012 budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) buys
18% less research than in 2004. On 2 January 2013, budget sequestration
mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011 could reduce NIH extramural funds
still further, producing a staggering cumulative 41% decline in a single
decade (in constant dollars, from 2004 to 2014), down to the level that NIH
invested in 1997. In contrast, China’s governmental support for biomedical
research may double that of the United States, or even, in proportion to
gross domestic product (GDP), quadruple it by 2017.*
In dollars, the contributions of NIH-supported research to human health,
jobs, and national economic growth far surpass investments budgeted by
Congress. The obvious inference: Investment in NIH should not shrink but
steadily increase, at a rate proportional to GDP. Instead, as grant dollars
shrink, institutions will be forced to curtail biomedical research
drastically, mimicking the recent layoff of 150 research faculty and
hundreds of other employees by the University of Miami’s Miller School of
Medicine. Established researchers at rich institutions may survive, but many
in the rising generation of young investigators and in small research
programs will drown. Institutions will further trim hard-money contributions
to faculty sala- ries and find it even harder to pay for and populate
research facilities they recently expanded. Competition for faculty
positions, grants, and published papers will grow ever fiercer. And the
postdoctoral holding tank will brim over, as myriad well-trained young
scientists vainly seek research jobs.
Apparently unaware that the model for funding U.S. biomedical research is
close to collapse, key stakeholders in the biomedical research com- munity,
like mythical Titanic passengers, busy themselves rearranging deck chairs.
We urge those stakeholders—faculty, academic administrators, funding agency
leaders, and (if it can) Congress itself—to unite to plot a dramatically
different course. Radical actions are called for that distribute scarce
resources more efficiently, with a focus on helping the best young and
established scientists survive the present storm for as long as it lasts,
even if it means a substantial decrease in the size of their research groups.
Research institutions must discard their present corporate business model,
which is based on the assumption that federal funds to support research
programs will increase every year. Those institutions must invest more in
direct salary support for faculty scientists and less in bricks and mortar.
NIH should require institutions to pay a larger share of principal
investigators’ salaries (in increments, spread over time), and indirect
cost rules that currently encourage universities to build labs rather than
nourish their own faculty must be changed.† Even more broadly, faculty
, administrators, research institutions, and NIH must work together to
tackle knotty problems of resource distribution, as we describe in the
supplement.
Academic labs today depend on graduate students and postdocs to supply the
workforce that keeps them humming. This dependence, which gen- erates
multiple potential competitors for soft-money positions and grants but does
not always train young scientists effectively, must be reduced by
implementing and further strengthening the recommendations of a just-
released report from NIH’s Biomedical Research Workforce Working Group.&#
8225;
To devise effective local and national responses to the impending crisis,
new strategies must be implemented quickly. The status quo is untena- ble,
and the alternatives are dire: Failure to adjust to the new reality means
that stakeholders may be forced to scrounge seats in a lifeboat, or—like
the majority of Titanic passengers—drown.
*See supplementary materials at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/science.
1226460/DC1 (text and figure). †B. Alberts, Science 329, 1257 (2010).
‡http://acd.od.nih.gov/bmw_report.pdf.
10.1126/science.1226460 |
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