NIH Cuts Back On New And Competitive Grants

Competition for research funds will heat up, but most scientists sat that NIH is making the right decision. WASHINGTON, D.C.--The National Institutes of Health have long struggled with a painful dilemma. Given finite dollars, how can a funding agency manage to reward proven investigators while still nurturing fresh talent? In recent years, NIH's answer has been to trim existing grants in order to fund more new scientists. But in a recent major change in policy, NIH has decided to sharply reduce the number of new, competing grants - and use the money to boost existing awards. The decision, predictably, is a mixed blessing for scientists. Joe Coulter of the University of Iowa, for example, whose current NIH grant had been cut by 10% in each of the past two years, may eventually be able to stop dipping into state funds to pay the stipends of two of his postdocs. Researchers like the University of Southern California's Willa Hsueh, however, will be facing stiffer competition for their grant applications. And Hsueh worries that the tougher scramble for funds may drive away the next generation of medical scientists. But overall, the response of the scientific community has been guardedly optimistic. "NIH is acting responsibly," says Terry Lierman of Capitol Associates, a lobbyist whose company specializes in medical issues. The roots of the recent decision stretch back a decade or more. For years the research community has tried to sell Congress on the idea that the number of competing grants is a barometer of the health of U.S. biomedical research. More grants mean more new blood flowing into the system, the logic went, and the argument proved to be remarkably successful. From a low of 4,785 in 1980, the number of competing grants rose steadily until it reached 6,446 in 1987. At one point Congress even enshrined a number - 6,500 - into law. The argument was also employed in recent years to fend off drastic cuts in NIH's budget sought by the Reagan administration. But the number of competing grants wasn't the only thing on the rise in the 1980s. So were the costs of biomedical research and the size of NIH grants. Between 1983 and 1987, for example, the average individual investigator grant grew by 42%, to $176,000. In addition, the length of the average investigator grant increased significantly, rising from 3.3 years in 1983 to more than four years at present. The change in length was a deliberate response to complaints from scientists that they were spending too much time applying for funding. To put even more pressure on NIH's resources, expanding opportunities in biomedical research led to a steady rise in the number of grant applications - up nearly one-third since 1980. NIH's budget was also growing, but not nearly fast enough. "NIH is to a great extent a victim of its own success," observes Dave Moore of the American Association for Medical Colleges. "The pressure from Congress to raise the number [of new and competing grants] was occurring at the same time these other factors were at work. Now there are more than 20,000 grants in the system, and it takes a hell of a lot of money to service them." NIH officials tried to tackle the problem first by gently tightening everyone's belt. The theory was that there's always a little fat in any proposed budget. So, beginning in the fall of 1986, they began to trim grants already in the pipeline. But as the cuts got deeper - they were averaging close to 10% at some NIH institutes - the research community began to scream in protest. Scientists across the country complained that the cuts had gone past the fat and into the bone, making it impossible in some cases to carry out the research that had been approved by reviewers. Many warned that the cuts, if they continued, could distort the entire process under which the federal government selects the best research to support. "NIH tells Congress that it distributes funds based on merit review," says Iowa's Coulter. "Then along comes NIH bureaucracy, which mandates a 10% cut so that there'll be a little more money to spread around. That undermines the credibility of the research itself. Even with only 90% of the money, you're still expected to do 100% of the work." The complaints helped prod NIH into its new policy of cutting back on new and competing grants. "Our decision is meant to keep the level of downward negotiations from reaching the point at which you begin to see a negative impact on the research," acknowledges Katherine Bick, deputy director for extramural affairs. "When you go above 10% [in cutting an individual grant], you really begin to change what the investigator has proposed and what the study section reviewed." This year the number of competing grants will drop by 900, to 5,324. Next year's proposed budget contains similar medicine, dropping competing grants down another 600 to 4,719. At the same time, NIH plans to boost the size of individual grants, reducing the impact of what it has euphemistically referred to as "downward negotiations." The size of the cuts will vary by institute. Ironically, the decision to abandon a particular number of new and competing grants coincides with the recent defeat of one of the staunchest advocates of the concept, ex-Sen. Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.). But the man who devised the concept, former NIH director Donald Fredrickson, says that it was never intended to be a permanent symbol of the health of the medical research enterprise. "I was surprised that it lasted as long as it did," admits Fredrickson, who led NIH from 1975 to 1981, "because the cost of supporting an increasing number of new grants keeps going up every year. Pretty soon it got to be too big a burden." Fredrickson originally chose the number 5,000 after a national conference in 1978; since then, Congress and the research community have worked diligently to increase that figure. But the proposed Reagan budget for 1990 suggests that even that original level may soon become a thing of the past. But cutting the number of new grants in order to preserve the quality of exisiting science has its own price - the loss of confidence by those investigators who depend on NIH to help them build a career in research. The percentage of competing grants that are approved is already at a historic low - as little as one in four at some institutes - and the prospect of even greater competition makes some scientists wonder if they are in the right profession. "I don't know what to tell my trainees," says Hsueh, a USC professor of medicine with a history of NIH support for her work on renal disease. "If I advise them to do research, have I condemned them to a life of uncertainty? My mentors seemed to be doing all right, and they told me it was possible to pursue a satisfying career in academic medicine. But that's no longer the case; everybody seems to be living on the edge now." NIH's Bick says that she's not happy about the decline in opportunities for scientists seeking federal funds. But she thinks that NIH is doing the right thing in trying to ensure that the research it does fund is given adequate support. "Of course that's not a good message for young people," she says about the decline in approval rates. "But people have known for a long time that funding is very competitive. I don't think it's keeping people from going into their chosen field." Most scientists and lobbyists seem to applaud NIH's decision to strike a balance between the need to bring new blood into the system and the desire to support existing grantees at a reasonable level. But they remain worried about the long-term impact of a situation where there isn't enough money to go around. "The government has to decide what it wants to spend its money on," says Iowa's Coulter. "Right now, we can get by with some belt tightening and fewer new grants. But what about 10 years down the road? If doing medical science becomes sufficiently unattractive to draw in new talent, the next time an AIDS epidemic comes along there may not be anybody in the lab to do the work. That's what I'm worried about."

NIH Cuts Back On New And Competitive Grants

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