A Piece of the Action

We lost another one last week. A bright young assistant professor in his first few years as an independent faculty member at a university E-mailed me to say that he was leaving academic science. He wasn't leaving because he wanted a bigger salary, or because he hated his job--quite the contrary; this is a man who loved what he was doing passionately. He was leaving because he had been unable to get funding for his research. This happens, of course, to people with bad ideas, or no ideas, but I don't think he fits either of those cases. I've seen his research proposals and I think the ideas were imaginative, even exciting. But they were not particularly fashionable and they were not sparklingly written, and he was not working at a powerhouse research institution. So we have lost a promising scientist and we have also lost the work he might have done, at least until someone else comes up with the same ideas. And even then, given the conservatism and trend-worship of the funding agencies, who knows if that someone else will have better luck? Anthony Canamucio Officials of the National Institutes of Health are actively seeking ideas for how to spend increasing funds. Afraid that they will have too little in the way of spectacular results to show for spectacular funding increases, they are throwing money at genomewide projects designed to accumulate reams of data while not increasing the number of individual investigator-initiated projects, at least not at anything like the same rate. So on the one hand we have an embarrassment of riches, while on the other we have people who leave science for want of a small amount of initial funding. To complicate the picture further, genomics is changing the scale of funding that investigators need. Driven by genomic discoveries and the cultural change they are creating, biology is becoming Big Science. To do front-line biology research increasingly requires access to expensive technology such as cDNA microarray facilities, mass spectrometry, mouse genetics, and so on. New investigators at small universities, whose start-up packages barely cover setting up a modest lab and paying a technician or postdoctoral fellow for a year or two, are having increasing trouble getting their programs off the ground, let alone competing in this climate. I have an idea that may help address these problems. Last year NIH awarded research grants to principal investigators at 485 degree-granting institutions in the United States. Since some of these were educational grants to nonresearch universities, let's say there are 400 PhD-awarding institutions in the biomedical sciences (the exact number doesn't really matter for this discussion). I propose that three starting faculty from each of these institutions, each year, be designated NIH Biomedical Beginning Investigators. Every beginning investigator will then be given a research grant of $175,000 each year for the first three years of his or her career. No proposal is needed and no review will be undertaken. Small and large schools will be treated alike. If an institution doesn't have three starting faculty members in one year, it may carry over those slots until they are filled, but no institution may have more than nine such investigators at a time. Thus, at steady state, the program will be funding up to nine people each year at 400 institutions at $175,000 per year, for a total outlay of $630 million. That is only 3 percent of the total NIH budget. Each year, 1,200 investigators will leave the program and up to 1,200 more will enter it. The money may not be used to pay any portion of the investigator's salary. Not a penny of institutional overhead (affectionately known as 'indirect costs') may be taken out of the grant. Apart from these two restrictions, the money can be used for any research-related purpose. If the investigator wishes to save the money for the first two years in an interest-bearing account and then buy a big piece of equipment at the start of year three, that is fine. No yearly accounting will be required. At the end of the third year the investigator must submit a two-page summary of the work that was supported, including a list of any publications and funding that has been garnered because of the results. This information will be collected and summarized but will never be used in any critique of the investigator by any funding agency. Quality judgments remain in research funding, in the regular research grants program, which would still account for more than 95 percent of the total budget. This proposal is meant to give the maverick, the geographically restricted, the late bloomer, [and] the gremlin from left field the opportunity to have something they do not have now: a piece of the action. We have long wondered whether, 'out there' somewhere, there may not be scores of great ideas that never see the light of day for want of initial funding. Now we can find out. It hedges our research bets, corrects for possible oversights that we may make in the peer review system due to ignorance, laziness, rigidity, and faddishness. My proposal is directed at the largest US funding agency, but there is no reason that a version of this program cannot be implemented at smaller agencies and at equivalent agencies in other developed countries. If so large-scale a program is impossible elsewhere, even a smaller version of it will still help deal with the same problems, which are endemic everywhere that governments support scientific research. If we do this, maybe there won't be so many E-mails like the one I just received. Gregory A. Petsko, PhD (petsko@brandeis.edu), is director, Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass. This Opinion is reprinted with permission from November 2001 Genome Biology (2[12]:comment 1014.1-1014.2), and the longer, original version can be viewed online at genomebiology.com/2001/2/12/comment/1014.

A Piece of the Action

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