Individual Investigators to Have Limit on NIH Funds

A point system seeks to ensure that funding is spread more evenly among researchers, especially early- and mid-career scientists.

Written byBob Grant

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WIKIMEDIA, LIBRARY OF CONGRESSTo researchers who receive scads of money from the National Institutes of Health every year, the agency has a message: the salad days are over. The federal funding agency announced yesterday (May 2) that it would be instituting a new point system to try and spread around grant money and prevent it from pooling in the coffers of well-established investigators.

As the NIH reported in 2010, roughly 10 percent of grantees are awarded about 40 percent of the research funding doled out by the agency. “While we have made progress in reversing the decline in grant funding to early-career investigators through various programs and policies, the percentage of NIH awards that support this group remains flat,” said NIH Director Francis Collins in the statement announcing the new program, called the Grant Support Index (GSI). “Unfortunately, gains for early-career investigators have been offset by a decline in the percentage of NIH awards that support mid-career investigators.”

The idea for a points system that ensures the NIH wealth is spread around a bit more is not a new one. Science advocacy organization the Federation of American Societies ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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