Cause Of Current Funding Crisis May Lie In De-emphasis Of Scholarship

De-emphasis Of Scholarship I have just returned from another study-section meeting. During a typically excruciating discussion of the most minute and insignificant details of a grant proposal, my mind wandered off a little, and I began to wonder about the enterprise that I have been part of for almost 30 years. What is science, anyway? At its best, science is an attempt to understand the natural world through a shared idiom-an understanding that can be enjoyed by anyone who is willing to learn the language. It seems to me that there are at least two components to this exercise-the collection of facts and their interpretation. Some of the greatest scientists in the history of mankind have contributed to this communal undertaking without grants, large laboratories, or scores of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. This may have been because our illustrious predecessors took the trouble to acquire a body of knowledge, thought deeply about the topic, and arrived at a synthesis, without fear of having to publish a set number of papers every year in order to satisfy the bean-counting gnomes in study sections. As one of the gnomes in the system for several years, I understand the reasons for this unfortunate tendency to count papers rather than evaluate their content. Science has become so diversified that most of us lack the expertise to objectively assess the true impact of a colleague's work. So we compromise and take the easy route-use quantity as a gauge of quality. This has led to a general tendency to sacrifice scholarship and thought on the altar of the mass production of data. Integral to the process of generating data is the need for an ever-enlarging cadre of scientists to perform more and more intricate and expensive experiments. This preoccupation with data rather than scholarship seems to underlie a problem that concerns many practicing scientists. Any time I travel to an institution of higher learning to present a seminar, invite a colleague to do the same at our Health Center, or convene with peers at a meeting, the conversation surely turns to problems many of us are having with grants. National Institutes of Health review panels (or study sections, in the vernacular) rate grant proposals on a scale of 1 to 5, with the most meritorious proposals garnering a rating of 1.0. Not too long ago, a proposal receiving a priority score of 2.0 was still fundable. We disparage our colleagues on study sections who have permitted the scores to creep upward all the time, making grants with "outstanding" scores of 1.3 unfundable. We are outraged by the fact that a grant with a score of 1.22 may be funded, while one with a score of 1.24 may be denied funding. We note with sorrow that the only way to ensure funding is to score 1.01, and wonder how anyone can possibly obtain such a score. We declare magisterially that the peer-review process has broken down; that it was not designed to deal with today's funding climate, that while it is possible to distinguish between the top 25 percent and the rest, it is not possible to tell the top 8 percent from the second 8 percent, or for that matter the next 8 percent. They are equally meritorious, we pronounce, and who gets funded and who does not is ludicrously capricious. We joke that if they just hire some monkeys and have them throw darts at grant proposals hung up on the wall, the outcome will make no more or less sense. We wonder darkly about favoritism and how much it matters where the grant originates-we are convinced that if two grants were equally "outstanding," the one from a Harvard University is more likely to be looked upon favorably than one from the much-maligned Podunk Medical School, wherever that might be. We peruse the "Funding Notes" published by NIH's Division of Research Grants (DRG) and see that the success rates fall off dramatically after one turns 50. Age discrimination, we proclaim! This analysis of the present funding climate is, for the most part, accurate, even though the prevalent hysteria on the part of us scientists about the funding climate has made us exaggerate the seriousness of the situation a little. It does appear that the peer-review process, as now instituted, was designed for a less competitive era. But I think that there is a deeper sickness in the system that my colleagues do not talk about, at least openly. Perhaps it is the all-too-human inability to admit one's own culpability, but we seem too willing to place the blame for the situation entirely on external forces: "them"-members of study sections, the NIH bureaucracy, the government, the military, the public at large-but not "us." Few scientists seem to admit that avarice and absence of long-term planning on our part have contributed as much to the crisis as any action or inaction on "their" part. When I was a Ph.D. candidate at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, almost three decades ago, I remember a fellow graduate student telling me that he could not wait to get his Ph.D. so that he get someone to do his scut work. This attitude reflected the behavior he noted in his mentors and role models. With rare exceptions, most professors who trained us did not toil at the bench. They were either preparing to go to meetings or were away at meetings-institutional, national, or international. After years being on an academic faculty myself, I am unconvinced that these meetings result in any measurable productivity, other than to provide academics, who love to hear themselves talk, opportunities to do so at interminable length. In any case, to actually work at the bench was, and remains, unthinkable to most faculty. I recall that in the late 1970s, when I was on the National Science Foundation's cellular physiology review panel, a fellow panelist announced: "Show me a scientist over 30 who does his own experiments and I will show you a failure." This attitude has not changed over the past two decades. One obtains one's Ph.D. and survives the rigors of postdoctoral years primarily to forsake one's training and occupy oneself with what one was never trained to do-manage money and people. Graduate student labor, inexpensive and readily available, is a seductive means to the end goal of more data. The widespread prevalence of training grants has made it easy to hire graduate students-one not only has access to cheap labor, but also does not even have to pay for it! I have been on training grant steering committees that have given away fellowships to less-than-stellar candidates for fear of losing the slots. This climate has generated an extraordinary game of grantsmanship-the more graduate students one has, the more money one needs to supply them with reagents, mice, and radioactive chemicals. Soon another grant is needed to keep the lab personnel occupied, which means that one can support more graduate students and even more prestige. It has been heady and wonderful. Two developments threaten to change the status quo. First, the policy-makers at NIH appear to have realized that there may be an oversupply of trainees and have de-emphasized training grants. Secondly, much to the chagrin of younger faculty members, college graduates seem to have learned that a career in science is fraught with serious problems. As a result, fewer and fewer gifted undergraduates are opting to apply to graduate schools. Market forces may act to stabilize the work force in science, but they operate far too slowly to avoid some real pain for a generation of young Ph.D.'s who are currently facing an inhospitable job market. Through the 1960s to the 1990s, many faculty members in the biological sciences introduced into the world 10 to 20 intellectual offspring. Without thinking, we were engaging in a Malthusian nightmare. I can think of no biological system that can withstand that kind of amplification in one generation. What makes it even worse is that the generation time for this venture is far shorter than the 20 years for human regeneration. My mentor is still churning out graduate students even as my ex-graduate student is graduating his-three generations of reproduction proceeding simultaneously! With ever-increasing numbers of biological scientists clamoring for grants, we found the policy-makers surprisingly eager to satisfy the ever-increasing demands for research budgets. The numbers of grants reviewed by NIH has grown from 16,792 in 1978 to 30,975 in 1993; the number of Ph.D.'s awarded in the life sciences increased from 1,500 in 1960 to more than 7,500 in 1993! Instead of realizing that this pace of growth cannot be sustained, we and our bureaucratic supporters at NIH pressure the government to secure ever more money. When we read estimates that more scientists are alive today than the cumulative total of scientists in history, we have rejoiced instead of panicked. But are these numbers appropriate or necessary? Suddenly, the growth threatens to stop. The crisis is well under way: Good, gifted scientists who have made genuine contributions are losing their labs. We insist on pointing our fingers at "them"-but never at ourselves. Even now, with all the uncertainties surrounding the federal budget, the NIH budget is one of the few branches of the government that might actually get an increase rather than be cut back. But we demand even more and threaten that without more funds, the system will collapse. It will be sad, however, if we do not learn any lessons from this crisis, if we are able to cajole more money from the government and get back to business as it was. We need to sit back and ask ourselves how many graduate students an average mentor should generate through his or her lifetime. We need to ask what the purpose of scientific training is-is it to merely to permit young, productive men and women the opportunity to sit in their offices and write grants and go to meetings? How many scientists do we need, anyway? We are justifiably proud of all the knowledge we have generated over the past 20 years. But can anyone actually claim real familiarity with all these masses of data? How many experiments, done only a few years ago, are being repeated, because so many of us glean factoids from meetings and casual conversations, rather than careful perusal of real papers? Isn't it time for us to raise a generation of scholars instead of experimenters, people who are willing to read, assimilate, and really understand all the information? I don't know, but I for one think that this crisis is not a bad thing if it forces us to look at ourselves and the way we conduct our business less complacently and more honestly. Overall, I am optimistic. The ready availability of federal funds spurred the mindless quest for more and more experiments and accelerated data acquisition, with a compelling need for large collections of assistants to help acquire the data. Without ever-increasing amounts of "preliminary data" as well as an over-full publication record, it was impossible to remain funded. Perhaps the tightening funding picture will paradoxically liberate more of us to step back and enjoy science-and really understand what we and our colleagues have learned over the past few decades. T.V. Rajan is professor and chairman of the department of pathology at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.

Cause Of Current Funding Crisis May Lie In De-emphasis Of Scholarship

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