WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTEThe number of principal investigators (PI) under age 46 with grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) declined between 1982 and 2014, according to a study published yesterday (June 5) in PNAS.
Two researchers carried out an independent investigation using information about the age of PIs and the number of R01 grants (NIH’s oldest and most commonly used grant program) awarded from the agency’s databases.
Their analysis revealed that over a 32-year period, the number of young investigators with R01 grants fell while the number of grantees over age 55 increased.
“That phenomenon was caused by the general aging of the scientist population, and also because NIH’s budget jumped quite suddenly in the late 1990s,” study coauthor Michael Levitt, a professor of structural biology at Stanford University told Science. “When you get money from Congress, you can't keep it in a savings account—it has to be spent . . . And it’s very easy to spend money ...
