Academy Panel Urges Companies To Help Train Young Bioscientists

Report says biotech firms must pick up the slack to supplement federal funding of the next generation of scientists WASHINGTON -- Biotechnology companies are running out of scientists, and it may be up to industry itself to educate the next generation of biochemists, according to a new report from the National Research Council. The report, funded by the National Institutes of Health at the behest of Congress, recommends that federally supported traineeships and fellowships for biomedical graduate students be increased from the current level of 3,681 positions to 5,200 by 1993. With the number of biotechnology firms having grown dramatically since the early 1980s, most of them can't find qualified scientists in areas such as pharmacology, toxicology, and enzymology, notes the Committee on Biomedical and Behavioral Research Personnel of the National Academy of Sciences. In particular, the panel recommends a 41% increase - from $91.5 million in 1987 to $129.2 million this year - in federal spending for predoctoral students. The report also recommends an annual increase of $10 million over the next three years in overall spending for predoctoral and postdoctoral training in biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research. It reports that current spending is $282 million. But the report has upset NIH officials, who question some of its figures. While the report recommends 4,300 predoctoral awards in 1990 and 4,600 in 1991, officials note that NIH will actually give out 6,003 predoctoral awards this year. And the proposed 1991 budget, they note, requests money for 6,195. But, at the same time, Congress may find it difficult in the current climate of budget austerity to kick in with the money needed to attract students into biomedicine, warns committee chairman Gerald Levey, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Industry itself must take up the slack, Levey says, suggesting that biotechnology firms create a new system of fellowships. "Our real message in this report is to the biotechnology industry," he says. "They've been utilizing more and more scientists trained in the NIH-university system, and if they think things are going amiss they have only themselves to blame. Maybe they should get in there and fund some of these traineeships themselves." Not so, according to Brian Sway, executive director of the California Industrial Biotechnology Association (IBA). "It's a suggestion that boggles the mind," Sway says. "Half the biotechnology companies are born and die in the time it takes a student to get a Ph.D." Sway believes that while job openings in the industry as a whole are growing at an annual rate of 4.1%, most individual firms are much too small to afford such support to academia. The committee projects that, because of death and retirement, U.S. universities by 2000 must mint at least 3,400 new scientists each year simply to maintain the current faculty levels. And such a pace won't meet the growing demand of companies for the highly trained minds that are needed to develop new cancer drugs or understand how nerve cells degenerate in Alzheimer's disease. "The industry is finding it increasingly hard to hire talent," says Sway. His organization conducted a survey of 120 California firms involved in biotechnology research in 1988 and found that 20% had great difficulty recruiting protein chemists and cell biologists. Nationwide, more than one third of biotechnology firms surveyed last year by the NRC reported labor shortages. By the end of this decade the number of new job openings for biomedical scientists could climb to more than 8,000 a year. Yet only about 4,000 students each year earn doctoral degrees in some area of biomedicine, according to the report, making for fierce competition between academia and industry. Although some observers argue that increasing salaries and the competition for scarce talent will eventually attract sufficient numbers of students into bioscience, others say that the process takes too long. "The average college student is 19 years old and won't be ready to start working until age 32," says panel member Thomas Reichert, vice president of medical affairs at the Becton Dickenson Corp. in New Jersey. "We can't afford to wait 13 years." The NRC panel and NIH officials actually disagree over current levels of federal support for predoctoral traineeships, in which funds go first to the university. The panel cites figures showing that the number has actually fallen in the past decade, from a high of 4,117 graduate students in 1980 to 3,900 in 1989. However, NIH says that there has been an increase during the period, to a 1989 level of 5,727. "The NIH figures are very hard to decipher," explains the NRC's Joe Baker, in explaining the disparity. Baker says that the panel started with NIH data from 1987 and extrapolated, based on the need for 400 new traineeships each year, to reach its recommended level of 8,600 such slots in 1991. In fact, however, NIH has requested a total of 12,020 awards in 1991. But political realities may make the difference moot. President Bush has requested a $5 million increase for NIH research training next year, to a total of $291.6 million. But that growth is less than half of what is needed to keep pace with inflation, and falls far short of the $31 million hike that Congress appropriated last year. A sympathetic Congress may once again find more money. But congressional aides predict that money for predoctoral training may lose out to a desire to prop up the number of research grants to individual investigators. As for corporate contributions, many firms are already chipping in as much as they can, says Reinaldo Gomez, vice president of research at Genentech, the south San Francisco company that leads the field. He notes that his company employs 40 to 45 postdoctorates in its laboratories. The California IBA also has a mentor program that trains high school biology teachers. Without waiting for an increase in support from the biotechnology industry or Congress, the academy report suggests a few stopgap measures for attracting potential Ph.D.'s. One would shorten the amount of time it takes to earn a degree, and a second would stretch out the awards to cover the period spent writing one's thesis. But Levey admits that those changes are hardly enough to insure a healthy supply of bioscientists in the next millennium. Diana Morgan is a freelance science writer based in Washington, D.C.

Academy Panel Urges Companies To Help Train Young Bioscientists

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