Archive for the 'NIH Budgets and Economics' category

NIH pilots special scrutiny of PIs with $1.5 M in total costs.

May 18 2012 Published by under NIH, NIH Budgets and Economics

Thoughts on NOT-OD-12-110:

The threshold of $1.5 million total costs. How's that break down? Well if you are in a consensus ~50% overhead state university, let's see...Thats FOUR full-modular awards. But let's be clear, odds are you got cut by at least a module per award so that's only $900K direct..you get to be in a University with about 70% overhead and you are still clear. What bout the much-rumored 100% overhead small institutions? well, you get three R01s before you go under strict scrutiny.

I do wonder if this will satisfy all the "kill the rich" voices? Will they see this as the NIH taking them seriously or as a meaningless sop?

Next question, this is just identifying special Council level review...No guarantee that any grant will ever be blocked because the PI has too much $$. No guarantee that negotiations wouldn't be made either. "Say, PI Jones, would you please put some more junior colleague on as titular head to one of your other awards so we can give you this one"?

new MultiPI awards won't trigger the scrutiny unless all PIs trigger the threshold. Hello courtesy "multi"PIship!!!

It may possibly change some people's strategy so that they work harder to distribute effort around to other people's awards in small percentages. Like junior PI is going to screw BigCheeze over on the agreed upon part of the direct costs? No worries there.

How are study sections going to respond to this. Will they take this as the NIH saying "This is our threshold for being worried about too much money. Now shut up about this for anything below this amount."? Or will they take this as encouragement to think about lab size even more when they are reviewing the grant in front of them?

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The NIH options for dealing with the budget stagnation are missing one...

May 18 2012 Published by under NIH, NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH Careerism

The AAAS has a summary up which deals with NIH's head of the Office of Extramural Research Sally Rockey's comments on the FY13 budget for the NIH.

Sally J. Rockey, deputy director for extramural research at NIH, said that some changes in grants management already have been proposed as part of the president’s budget submission for the 2013 fiscal year.

and those solutions will be familiar to those following along at the RockTalk blog. It boils down to "kill the rich!!!". If you already have it, or have too much of it, they are gunning for you.

These include an across-the-board funding cut of 1% for continuing grants; negotiating the budgets for new competitive grants to avoid growth in the average size of award; eliminating increases for inflation in multi-year grants; giving additional scrutiny to researchers who already receive in excess of $1.5 million a year; and continuing to fund early-stage investigators at the same rate as established investigators for new grant applications.

The alternative posed by Rockey is "Darwinian".

“Many people thought we should keep the current system,” Rockey said. “Just keep the Darwinian approach. Don’t try to go in there and socially engineer anything.” Others weighed in on the merits of the various options for change, including some approaches beyond those discussed by Rockey. These could include limiting payment for indirect costs associated with grants, limiting large project grants, and providing more support to small labs and individuals by limiting grants to large labs.

Well it sure looks like this depiction to me.
Just about the only person who is not under potential attack under this scenario is the small town grocer. Otherwise known as Noonan. I have been reluctant*, I will admit, to even think very much about something that has been raised (identified?) by PhysioProf on numerous blog posts. It boils down to the suggestion that it is the Small Town Grocer scientists that are precisely who the NIH should be dropping from the system. Actually, PP tends to phrase this as a suspicion that this is just what the NIH is up to, rather than a suggestion that they should do so.

Since he's been making this comment I've gradually noticed that this option is never raised. Rockey maybe touched on it a teensy bit in the AAAS piece.

Institutions also could help manage the demand for grant money by reducing the number of applications submitted by their faculty, Rockey said. And NIH can examine its research priorities, seeking to reduce support for less innovative ideas and eliminating some of the duplication of effort.

Oh yeah. You do it for us, University of State. Right. Like that is in their interest. Sorry but we're in tragedy of the commons territory Dr. Rockey and you are going to have to do this yourself if you want it to happen. Take a hard run at the smaller, lesser and slower producing laboratories. Stop saving them with bridge funding, stop taking pity on your "long term funded investigators" and the like.

It is indubitably the case that we have too many investigators seeking too few grant dollars. All of the main solutions on the table are going to squeeze the most productive, best funded laboratories (not to mention the noobs who finally managed to land their first grant to find a cut that oblates a warm body). Just so that more awards can be made. To, presumably, the small timers.

And those more productive labs are going to fight back as best they can. Submit even MORE grant to make up for the cut funds. Work deals with their friends and junior colleagues to be collaborating investigators so to hide the amount of direct funds going into the laboratory. Pursue training grants, beg for supplements....whatever it takes. They are not going to go "hum, well, I'm just going to be happy with less".

And, sad but true, these are likely going to be the people on study section stepping down hard on, guess who? Investigators who are not like them.

You want Darwinian, Deputy Director Rockey?

If a better-funded, more-active reviewer is really thinking, s/he is best off bashing the crap out of one-trick-pony PI's grants. Why? Because you might just put them out of the game permanently! If you can do that, you've reduced the competition in a real way. Conversely if you stamp on a reasonably well funded and reasonably active PI, you haven't put them out of business at all. Just ensured they will put in yet more grants.

Look, I'm still not sure I know the best path. I love the democratic nature of the ideal of the NIH pure Investigator Initiated system. Anyone with a good idea should be able to get funding.

But I also believe that little gets done on one full modular, cut to $200/yr, maybe reduced to 4 yr grant anymore**. Research programs may not be efficient after 5 grants but they sure as heck aren't in the sweet spot with one either.

And I know for damn sure the insecurity and grant churning of the past 5-8 years has been hugely detrimental to the conduct of science.

Sadly, I don't see that any of the proposals of the NIH do anything to decrease churning.

UPDATE: see NOT-OD-12-110, just published today:

This Notice announces NIH’s intent to pilot procedures for investigator-initiated grants and cooperative agreements in consideration of managing resources during austere times. During May 2012 NIH Institute and Center (IC) Advisory Council meetings, Councils will discuss and pilot-test procedures for the additional review of grant and cooperative agreement applications from Program Director(s)/Principal Investigator(s) [PD(s)/PI(s)] who already receive in excess of $1.5 million per year in total costs to determine if additional funds should be provided to already well-supported investigators. The feedback from this pilot will help NIH further refine policies for managing limited grant resources.

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The cartoon, btw, is stolen with apologies from Dent. I, uh, altered it.

*anyone who thinks their relative position in the NIH world is predictable or static needs their head examined. I could be calling for an option that will end my lab's viability here.

**Read this. It is short.

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Francis Collins assures Congress that NCATS won't draw from basic research

Mar 21 2012 Published by under NIH, NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH funding, Politics

via the Nature News Blog we learn that NIH Director Collins has been called upon by Congress to explain NCATS. This is the acronym for his pet project a Center dedicated to "Translational Science" that required axing the venerable National Center for Research Resources.

Collins noted that NIH’s support for basic research has held steady at about 54% of the agency’s budget for decades. “I do not expect that percentage to change,” he said. He added repeatedly that all but 2% of the $575 million funding the translational medicine center this year comes from preexisting NIH programs, and is not “new” money.

Some legislators, understanding quite clearly that money is fungible were keen to press Collins:

Representative Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, interrupted Collins to insist that he explain how the $64 million increase proposed for NCATS in 2013 can’t be seen as being largely funded by a cut to the Institutional Development Award (IDEA) program. The NIH in 2013 has proposed cutting $50.5 million from the program, which funds biomedical investigators, trainees and infrastructure in 23 largely rural states that have historically experienced low application success rates for NIH grants.

“I would not want you to see a direction connection between…the IDEA program and NCATS. Those are not the same dollars that just got moved from one box to another,” Collins responded.

“Dollars are dollars,” Lummis replied.

Exactly. And similarly there are plenty of imaginable grants that would be "translational science" that Collins will get to score in the "basic" category as well. Another CongressCritter argued with Collins that a prior boost to the IDEA program was intended to be permanent, something Collins disputed. Yes, keeping track of this slippery customer down the line will be pretty hard for our intrepid Congressional heroes.

There was another bit of testimony that drew my eye because it speaks to the potential upside of NCATS rather than whinging (ahem) about the costs to other programs. NCATS is supposed to somehow do better than the pharma industry. Ok, fine, but it sort of presumes the pharma industry is full of morons*. I've seen this before from academics under various guises of "Rational Drug Design" and the like. I am, shall we say, skeptical. In this particular bit of testimony on the "we're smarter than they are, nyah, nyah" defense for NCATS a BigPharma type observed that FC is full of stuff and nonsense:

That view was challenged later in the hearing by Roy Vagelos, the former CEO of Merck, who said that the pharmaceutical industry spends about $50 billion annually, or roughly 100 times the NCATS budget, without solving the problems, like inadequate toxicology, that cause so many failures in drug development . “Does anyone in the audience believe that there is something that NCATS is going to do that the industry thinks is critical and that they are not doing? That is incredible to think that. If you believe that you believe in fairies.”

Vagelos added that, with success rates for applicants for NIH grants at historic lows, “We would be doing a lot more good for getting important new drugs on the market,” by funding more young investigators.

Word, PharmaDude, word.

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*unless it addresses things that the profit industry is not really capable of grappling with such as their penchant for huge payoff, block buster, serves everyone type of drugs.

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NIGMS Posts FY2011 Funding Outcome

Feb 15 2012 Published by under NIH, NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH Careerism, NIH funding

Despite a recent bobble of a perfectly reasonable question from Comrade PhysioProf by new NIGMS Director Judith Greenberg, NIGMS continues to be our favorite IC on the grant geekery front because they post their funding outcome data.

The latest info is posted here and I've taken the liberty of grabbing the first figure. It depicts the competing R01/equivalent applications by priority score that emerged from the initial review and differentiates the ones that they funded versus the ones that they did not. I like these depictions because you can see the rarity of "skips" (those apps which are not funded despite being scored within the range of nearly certain funding and the way "exceptions" (aka "pickups") still have some relationship to score. Furthermore, you can maybe look across time and see whether the sharpness of the dropoff in chances of getting picked up as you step up away from the apparent payline (the point under which virtually everything gets funded) has changed. This latter might indicate the degree to which Program is meddling with the initial priority rankings.

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Long term investment in a scientific program, as opposed to supporting short-duration projects.

Jan 26 2012 Published by under Careerism, NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH Careerism

Commenter Adriana suggests something very interesting on a prior post addressing NIH grant funding policies, the change to only a single revision, etc.

Some of this seems counter productive. People that have spent maybe 15 or so years setting up model systems and generating hypotheses (paid for by NIH) are getting cut off right at the time their projects are starting to produce high yields. In a lot of cases the funds are diverted to new investigators with worse priority scores to set up more new models systems. Just when they get going they will probably get cut off too.

My first reaction was "whoa!" Bad optics, homes! Telling the grant funders that "well, give me 15 years of full funding and then see what I really produce!" sounds a bit like vapor ware. A confidence racket of some sort.

But I've also mentioned something about the trendlines of scientific careers. And sure, I've often seen PIs experience a huge surge in productivity during the middle career years after an initial interval of struggle. The grants come in, the postdocs come buzzing around and all of a sudden the lab is a serious player. It can take 5-8 years, easy. Several of my most salient examples match this sort of timeline. Fifteen years though? Fifteen years from the start of the lab to the acceleration phase?

That is a little more unusual to me. I"m not saying there are not people that have ups and downs throughout their careers, sure there are. I know plenty. So a downturn in year 10 is not necessarily predicting a lasting decline and yes, when grants come back the lab starts roaring again. But usually, this is not from a lab that has been in the doldrums for the prior 10 year interval. Usually, from what I see, that lab has had prior indications of the potential.

Let us leave specific predictors of timeline aside for a moment however. It doesn't really matter if we're talking early-mid or mid-mid career, some of the implications of the current NIH policy-making still apply.

I think I've tried a time or two to get into the "cry me a river" post for people like.....well, me. I don't feel sorry for me. Okay, that's a lie, I do feel very selfishly sorry for myself if I cannot obtain the grant funding that I desire and think that I, in some way, deserve.

"I saw the generation just prior to me hit the sigmoidal acceleration phase when I was a late postdoc and early faculty member. That is my model of expected value in the NIH-funded career path. If I do as well as they did in the early phase, dammit, I deserve my chance to shine. I've struggled to build not just a lab, not just a few projects but a scientific program. And now, just as I'm getting to the point where things should be relatively comfortable and highly productive..this. The NIH budget goes south, those extra grants are harder to come by, the renewals much, much less certain and I'm still struggling. Dammit."

Sound familiar my mid-career friends?

Of course, our "struggle" much of the time is not the struggle just to stay alive. We have a grant or two to last us through the bad times. When things get really rough, heck, we can finally get around to writing up old papers to keep productivity smooth. We have endless amounts of technical preliminary data on which to base new applications, maybe even some pilot data that supports a hypothesis. We know a lot of folks on study sections personally and some of them are, at last, kinda junior to us. Junior enough that they might, gasp, actually see our applications as coming from "a well established and accomplished scientist".

Things could be worse.

This is why my sympathies for people like me continue to be muted when it comes to different policy points over there in NIH land. Yes, I would for sure like to see the next generation ahead of me suffering the same conditions that I seem to experience. See the old guard be treated as harshly as everyone else in the granting system. You know what? It may be happening, much as we think the grass is greener. How will we know until after the fact? After all the data emerge in 8-15 years showing what happened in this time of stress.

Will the NIH system really experience investigator dropout in serious numbers? Will we come to find that the major effect was on the amount of funding over 10yrs of PI time, but not on the number of total investigators? Will we find that my generation, the mid-career types, pay a specific toll....as is being hypothesized by Adriana?

I will say that the NIH ignores the winy, selfish complaints of the current crop of mid-career investigators at their peril. These are the very people who are putting in the long hours on study sections reviewing grants. If they feel that ESI folks are getting too much in the way of assistance, regardless of whether they are or not on some objective measure, they are going to push back. And continue to punish ESI applications. Subconsciously perhaps, but it will be there. Actually, it has always been there.

Mid-career folks have probably always been tremendously to blame for the fact that every initiative of the NIH to help the newly independent secure grant funding has fallen short. Because NIH is in a reinforcing cycle of pecking order.

Driven by the nearly inescapable, hindbrain driven, emotional, fierce belief of mid career scientists that dammit, they deserve their chance for an explosive phase in their labs.

I don't have any answers for the NIH.

I feel this way about my own laboratory and research program.

I bet a million dollars you do too.

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Petition your Congress Critter

Nov 11 2011 Published by under Call yer CongressCritter, NIH Budgets and Economics

I ran across a Change.org petition on the Twitts today that asks Congress to support scientific research in the current budget discussions. This one is focused on the NIH:
Congress: increase federal research funding for the National Institutes of Health

The text reads, in part:

Dear Members of Congress

I am writing to you today to implore you to support the House proposal to increase the 2012 National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 3.3% ($31.7 billion). Since the 1930’s, the NIH has been a fundamental supporter of basic biomedical research in the U.S. Funding from the NIH supports research in all 50 states. These awards are made to over 3,000 universities, medical schools, and research institutions, and they support more than 350,000 researchers. NIH funding to basic research has supported findings that were honored by 121 Nobel Prizes, including this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The nonprofit coalition United for Medical Research concluded that funding by the NIH in 2010 produced $68 billion in new economic activity, which is a greater than 100% return on our investment!

I urge you to add your name to the petition.
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The bumpersticker is from Zazzle.

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Congress Critters want to reduce the NIH salary cap

Oct 27 2011 Published by under Call yer CongressCritter, NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH Careerism

from Nature:

The 2012 spending bill would cut the salary cap by 17%, from US$199,700 to $165,300, for extramural scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health...

I was wondering when some Congress Critter would figure out s/he can make some hay out of attacking scientists for their exorbitant salaries.

Here's my question though. Since $250,000 per year is "middle class" according to the last round of political rhetoric which addressed the salary/class issue...by what justification should scientists be under attack?

[bit of a Twittersation going on as well, start here]
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p.s. The vast majority of NIH funded PIs are way, waaaaaay under the salary cap, going by my experience. I would estimate that a disproportionate number of them are MD's as well. The theory on this latter is that they need to be bribed, I mean equivalently compensated, away from purely clinical careers. Agree or not, it needs to be considered.

p.p.s. While this sounds good on paper, in the immediate and medium term, this would roll back on those of us who are not BSD investigators making cap. Why? Because the Uni's would have to come up with the difference. Money being fungible, this means less cash for startup packages, bridging support, faculty senate pilot awards, paying for administrative staff, graduate student salaries....

p.p.p.s. Despite the pain, and the fact that some day I'd love to be at cap as it is right now, I'm actually in support of this. In the abstract. And if there were some way to stave off the immediate pain for junior folks (there isn't) I'd be a lot happier about it.

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The Program Staff of the NIH decide what to fund, all else is advisory

Oct 25 2011 Published by under NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH Careerism

...and if I have it right, the Director of a given IC is really the one who makes the decision to fund or not fund a given grant proposal...and even the input of their own Program Staff is only advisory.

Some comment over at writedit's thread on paylines is incensed about the NCI:

how are the NCI officials better qualified then the peer reviewers to judge the importance of these “selected” studies?

Because They. Have. A. Different. Perspective. on the fields of science. A broader perspective. In the best of all worlds, the Program Staff have the opportunity to step back and look at the larger trends within the science that is within their jurisdiction. To see where current fads have left holes in their portfolio. To perhaps take a risk where the peers are conservative. To identify the duplications and overlaps within their own portfolio and adjust accordingly. To worry about the next generation of scientists. Etc.

How can individual scientists, or even a panel of 25-30 of them, possibly take the long view? They cannot. So there is a role for Program. We can debate whether a funding agency should be sensitive to the long view, balance of effort, inherent self-referential conservatism that emerges in science now and again, etc. I'll come down squarely in favor of breadth on that one. But let us not pretend they have no functional role.

They should not be make funding decisions. They are messing up the once well established system.

Yes, yes they should be making funding decisions. This is the job of Program, actually. They are part and parcel of the "well established system".

I've touched on this ever so briefly before, see Program Interferes with.... and NIH Administrators Ignore...

Oh glory...since I started writing this post, the commenter doubled down:

If the grants do not fit the NCI portofolio they should not be sent forward for peer review in the first instance; and more importantly these same grants that do not fit the portofolio in the first place should not be sent back for an A1 revision which consumes a whole lot of funds to generate additional preliminary data. I think this suggests that not all the decisions are made by well qualified individuals at NCI.

and an echo from yet another commenter....

If NCI had told me that my app. did not fit their portofolio, I wouldn’t have wasted freaking 4 yrs submitting A0 and A1( plus wasting peer review efforts). And before submitting my A0, I had even consulted my SRO. I’m pissed that NCI changed rules in the middle of the game

HAHAHAHAAHA!!!! This commenter no doubt would be raising a big stink if his/her grant got rejected without even going out to peer review. But the underlying principle that Program should be highly pro-active about refusing grants before they even get reviewed is stupid. There is no chance for reviewers who are more expert in the science to point out whether it fits the mission or not. Program staff are not omniscient. They need their extramural scientists to educate them. Not to dictate their job priorities, not at all. To educate. To provide a portion of the knowledge, information and evidence that Program staff require to do their part of the job. This is at the root of the investigator-initiated science funding system is it not? It is our job to make our case. The job of peer review to provide one viewpoint on that case. The job of Program Staff to provide another set of inputs.

I like this. I like the ability to make my case for what I am interested in studying. I would be far less enthralled to have to always fit into some pre-existing set of Programmatic interests. I think our friends over at writedit's blog would be similarly distressed if there were a more heavy handed triage of applications prior to review.

The only way that would work is if someone at the Program level does a lot of triaging on the basis of the Abstract. Because I guarantee you the POs are not going to be reading all the apps in detail under such a scenario. Too many applications and too few POs. And if there were enough of them to do so? We'd all be crying foul about why it took 10X as many Program staff as they have now! Think of how many grants that would suck up. And they still couldn't offer the kind of specific expertise that the current peer-review system can muster.

and back to the original commenter.....

I would scream bloody murder if the grant was peer reviewed, fell in the upper 10th percentile and then was told that it did not fit the portofolio…….to an extent that is what is happening at the NCI….but you are entitled to your opinion

Of course the grey zone has long been familiar to those of us who seek funding from some of the other institutes. I have my doubts, of course, about assertions that some of the ICs have or had a policy of sticking strictly to the outcome of the initial peer review. But....perhaps this has indeed been the case at NCI. And the Chicken Littles can be excused, a trifle, for not knowing how it goes down. We have only the hard data from NIGMS but these graphs fit very well with my subjective experiences as an applicant, a friend and colleague of applicants, watching what emerges from a study section on which I served, talking with POs, etc. Take this FY2010 R01 funding outcome graph from NIGMS as an example:

Open rectangles depict the number of grants reviewed, the dark bars the number funded. The X axis depicts percentile scores that emerged from initial peer review. What this shows is that genuine "skips" are relatively rare. There is a clear payline (formally published or not, you can see where it lies) below which almost everything gets funded. Above that line is the grey area. A zone above the payline (I note for those who are thinking that they "deserve" to get funded) in which only a subset of the grants get funded. Notice the trendline though? Even this is influenced strongly by the priority score/percentile rank, right? The chances of an application being funded as an exception to the payline increases as the score moves closer to that payline.

The NCI has apparently been talking a payline in the 7-8%ile zone and mollifying investigators that they will "consider" everything up to some 25 %ile for exception funding. Pickups. So the scenario raised by the commenter is asking about apps in the 8-10%ile range and their chances of being skippped over. Unless NCI takes a very different approach to exception funding, the chances for such a score are probably still quite good. Once you get a couple of bins away from the payline in the NIGMS data above (and check the sidebar at the NIGMS page for prior Fiscal Year trends) then the chances for any application funding get pretty slim.

It is difficult for me to understand how anyone can look at the distribution of funded/unfunded grant application in this grey area and think that they "deserve" to be funded with scores that are above the payline. I say rather that people should feel lucky to get the nod, given that few of the apps are being funded.

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Think it through all the way, "seasoned" reviewer....

Oct 20 2011 Published by under NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH Careerism, NIH funding

The latest thread over at OER head Sally Rockey's blog is a treasure trove of disgruntleprofness. I'd like to draw your attention to this comment from "seasoned reviewer".

As a reviewer, I see grants all of the time with 400K budgets that are essentially paying a PI 180K, a postdoc 50K and a senior tech 75K that produce 1-2 papers per year. Yes, that is reasonable for the amount of staff, but it is WAY over priced in relationship to grants with 250K per year budgets that have a PI paid 25% of salary, a tech and some grad students that publish 2-3 papers per year. Further, the grad students end up paying back the US economy greatly since they then go to high paying jobs in industry, increase the tax base, and provide skilled workers for the biotech industry. Thus, the grant’s impact is greatly multiplied, great science is done and skilled workers are produced.

Easy fix, no? Well...no.

I'm not going to argue with the soft money versus hard money PI issue except to point out that in my grant reviewing experience, and general knowledge of how many grants a lot of hard- and soft-money colleagues maintain, it is rare that a PI who is at cap is devoting 100% effort to one R01.

One essential point is that this person seems to be objecting to the sort of living wage, career stability and anti-exploitation issues that often pop up on the other side of the equation. How can this person suggest prioritizing grad student labor over postdoc labor? Where are all those grad students supposed to go after they defend if we shrink back the postdoctoral support on funded grants? They are all going to just shuffle off into "high paying" jobs in industry and biotech, eh? This betrays fantastical thinking. Those jobs are drying up too! There is no guarantee that a steady stream of graduate student labor (and there is an argument that you are going to need even more warm bodies if you dispense with the expertise that is represented by the postdoc cadre of labor) is going to find a home in industry the minute they defend their PhD.

The comment objects to "senior techs" and presumably refers to more junior ones in the second sentence. Again, where are these junior techs supposed to go? Is this person recommending age discrimination as an industry (NIH funded science, that is) wide practice to save money? Really? This is morally reprehensible.

Then we come to this prediction that the single* grant lab is more productive on a per dollar basis. I used to share this bias but it needs to be placed in a bit of context. One of the things I have ranted on about in the past is the assessment of productivity of a PI. I've commented that it is unfair during grant review that the Gestalt impression of a lab's productivity usually fails to account for the denominator. This can be because a reviewer has an impression based on reviewing manuscripts, seeing TOC feeds and PubMed alerts that this lab is really pumping out the papers. When it gets more objective, say on a competing renewal application, there can be a lot of papers listed which serve double duty. That is, a smart PI will list every plausible grant award as having contributed to each paper. That way each paper counts 2 or 3 times. The reviewer who looks at the Progress Report is not typically motivated to assign fractional publication credit by delving into the PIs other Awards, the Acknowledgement sections of each paper, etc. It is just too much work, there is no good, objective way to do the fractional crediting and it is unclear that such an analysis would do anything but irritate the rest of the panel anyway!

So far I'm sounding on the side of "seasoned reviewer" on the productivity front, no? But here's the thing....the appearance of higher productivity is also the reality of higher productivity...over the long haul. Sometimes projects go into a rut. Sometimes the grant renewal cycle is painful and long....and can introduce funding gaps. You can't always hire 1.5 staff members on one grant but you can hire 3 on two grants. Major equipment or other resources...ditto.

I am reluctant to admit this. I still believe that all else equal the starting out, n00b young lab with one grant is likely to be the best productivity bet. But this requires that things go well. That the person has startup to buy the equipment. That staff can be found when needed (i.e., day 1 of the award). That the scope of the science that is necessary (in a post-hoc sort of way) to good productivity has been proposed and funded by the award. That unforeseen holes are not stepped into.

The trouble is, things don't always go perfectly in science. And the single-award, $250K direct costs laboratory is at greater risk for major productivity disturbance from hindrances that a multi-award lab can surmount.

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*I'm assuming from context the person doesn't really mean only $400K single-R01s but is probably referring to overall level of support...

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The NIH Jobs Plan

Sep 12 2011 Published by under General Politics, NIH Budgets and Economics, NIH funding

The NIH budget, $30Billion in round numbers, runs something on the order of $100 per taxpayer.

One five year R01 is about $2M, including overhead. This provides about 1.5-2 jobs on the direct science front. Also small fractions of the effort of a number of administrative and support staff (from housecleaning to security to animal care staff....). I don't know how this compares with other stimulus proposals. But I do know that if I land a grant, I need to create a job and fill it. Or at the very least I avoid laying someone off. Yes, during this economic downturn the award of NIH grants for which I am the PI has resulted in the employment of the previously unemployed.

If one wanted to fund salary lines directly through fellowships, $58Million would buy about 1,000 junior scientists. Grad students or nondegreeseeking techs, if that was your desire.

The Civilian Conservation Corps was a makework government program which happened to leave a durable legacy. I was just enjoying some CCC built trails and park facilities this past summer, as it happens.

The impact of scientific advance is likely to leave an even more durable public legacy. That however is bonus. The real focus should be on employing people.

Increasing the NIH budget can help with that.

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for any new to this blog, see Disclaimer. I am an interested party. But then so are the denizen's of Wall Street, GM line workers, renewable energy folks and anyone else advocating for their business to enjoy federal stimulus.

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