Institutions Respond In Large Numbers To Tiny Facilities Program At NIH, NSF

A flood of applications for small amounts of money reflects the problem of financing needed repairs to academic laboratories WASHINGTON -- New programs at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation offer overwhelming evidence that the demand for federal funds to replace crumbling academic research facilities is substantial. Defying odds that would scare off any self-respecting bettor, university administrators are expected to shower NIH with more than 100 requests for a mere $2.8 million in funds to be awarded this year to build or renovate biomedical research facilities in the fields of cancer; heart, lung, and blood; and vision research. Applications are due May 7, with awards to be made by September 30. At the same time, NSF has begun to sort through 425 applications for its own facilities-modernization program, also created last fall by Congress. NSF hopes to make available some $40 million, a figure that assumes Congress will duplicate in fiscal year 1991 the $20 million that it awarded NSF this year. However, university administrators have flooded NSF with $300 million in requests. The NIH program is an offshoot of congressional concern about biomedical research in the wake of the fire that destroyed the Jackson Lab mouse breeding facility. Last fall Congress appropriated $14.8 million for the construction of such a facility, chosen by peer review, at either the existing site in Maine or at another location in the U.S. At the same time, Congress rejected "without prejudice" an attempt by individual members to earmark funds for seven biomedical research facilities that had never undergone any formal peer review. Sensing an opportunity to address both problems in one stroke, NIH decided to spin off a tiny facilities renovation program with the money provided by Congress. It set a limit of $10 million for the mouse breeding lab, freeing the rest for competition among the several hundred institutions that conduct varying amounts and types of biomedical research. However, it carved out $2 million for existing proposals that had been accepted, but never funded, under a construction program begun in 1972 at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). And congressional language in the 1990 appropriations measure requires NIH to restrict this year's competition to projects under the auspices of the three institutes with legislative authority to award such grants: NCI, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the National Eye Institute. Still, the relatively minuscule amount of money available hasn't deterred university administrators, who are trying to overcome what presidential science adviser Allan Bromley and others have estimated to be a $10 billion problem. "We raised the minimum request to $500,000 to cut down on the number of requests," says NCI's Kenneth Brow about the change in criteria from the NCI program, which hasn't made any awards since 1987 owing to a lack of funds. "But it hasn't made any difference. The need is there, that's for sure." Brow says his office has already mailed out more than 200 program guideline kits, and that he expects about half of those institutions receiving the kits to submit a formal application. The rules require the institution to put up at least 25 percent of the total cost of the project, and the awards do not pay any indirect costs. The NSF program requires a 50-50 match for requests ranging from $100,000 to $7 million. It divides applicants into three categories based on what they now receive from NSF. That yardstick was meant to correlate with the amount of research performed. But figures on the number of applicants in each of the categories show that the demand is heavy regardless of how much research is under way. Nearly all the 105 institutions now getting more than $2 million annually from NSF have applied for a facilities grant, says program director Richard Green. About two thirds of the 110 institutions in the second category - those receiving between $400,000 and $2 million - have applied. But the largest number of proposals - 262 in total - comes from those institutions receiving less than $400,000, a category whose size Green estimates at "several hundred." Green knows that he will have to disappoint most of the applicants, even those with excellent proposals and compelling needs. "I'm not going to be able to make many $7 million grants," he says. "What we may end up doing is asking some of the best proposals to trim their requests so that they don't put themselves out of our range."

Institutions Respond In Large Numbers To Tiny Facilities Program At NIH, NSF

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