NIH Insiders Hopeful That New Measures Will Improve Intramural Research Efforts

Intramural Research Efforts Author: FRANKLIN HOKE, pp.1 Date: May 30,1994 Influence of the agency's scientific directors will ebb if NIH adopts revised methods of reviewing quality, approving tenure Scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health are optimistic that changes suggested by an external advisory committee in a recent report will prove effective in strengthening the agency's intramural research program. The program, seen by various observers to be slipping in quality in recent years, involves some 6,000 NIH scientists and postdoctoral trainees, with support of their efforts accounting for about 11 percent of NIH's $11 billion budget. By contrast, about 80 percent of the agency's money goes to its extramural program, in which tens of thousands of scientists in university laboratories and other research settings across the United States compete for comparatively scarce support. Increasingly, extramural research proposals judged by peer review to be "very good" or even "excellent" have failed to receive grant support, bringing the intramural program-- perceived by many extramural scientists as being less competitive --under closer scrutiny. Critics in and outside NIH say that the intramural research program, while still strong, has been declining compared to the extramural investigations and that the program is due for rejuvenation. Support for the report's recommendations is visible at the highest levels at the institutes. At least one prominent former extramural scientist--Nobelist Harold E. Varmus, the current NIH director--is enthusiastic about the suggestions. Even some NIH officials implicitly criticized in the report- -for example, the scientific directors--are supportive of its aims, although they disagree with aspects of the reasoning underlying the critique. A recent study produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia tends to confirm that the intramural program needs shoring up. The study, which compared the actual number of citations to papers by NIH scientists against the expected number for all papers of the same vintage and in the same journals, supports the view that NIH intramural research has been fading during the past several years (see chart on page 8). Meanwhile, the external advisory committee's report makes a number of specific recommendations aimed at confronting concerns about quality and accountability in the intramural program. The report, for example, seeks to secure the independence of the external boards of scientific counselors that review each institute's intramural research program. The document also suggests the creation of a committee composed of the chairpersons of these boards to encourage more uniformity across NIH in the review process. Another recommendation is to create a new NIH-wide tenure committee of senior scientists to approve tenure decisions, introducing a new emphasis on peer evaluation into that process. Overall, the report's suggestions would help to reward the most productive scientists and to make room at the institutes for younger investigators, NIH officials and the report's authors say. The proposals would also reduce the powers of the scientific directors of each institute and make them more accountable for the scientific performance of their programs. Some NIH scientists say the report's recommendations target central problems at the institutes and, if implemented, could significantly recharge the intramural program. "There's too much power in the scientific directors," says Hynda K. Kleinman, a research chemist and section chief at the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR). "And there is no uniformity among the institutes in the way they hire, fire, promote, or distribute lab funds and space." Kleinman says the changes could help to more closely tie an individual's career trajectory to the quality of his or her science. "Too much of it now is based on your relationship with your boss, rather than your scientific merit," Kleinman says. Despite the potential reduction in their influence, a number of the directors, most of whom are also senior NIH scientists with ongoing research projects, are cautiously supportive of the report's goals, if not all of its recommendations. Senior NIH administrators, often accomplished intramural scientists themselves, are backing the plan. "The bottom line is, we need to improve the quality of the review of the research at NIH," said Michael M. Gottesman at a news conference earlier this month at which the report was released. Gottesman is acting deputy director for intramural research and a laboratory chief at the National Cancer Institute. "We wish to revitalize this program. We want to begin to bring in young people who can establish their own research programs and be the future generation of NIH scientists. That's a strong commitment." One set of recommendations in the report calls for ensuring the independence of the external boards of scientific counselors who review each institute's intramural research program, assessing, for example, which projects and investigators deserve greater resources and which less. Currently, the scientific directors select the members of the boards of scientific counselors that review their programs. The report suggests that, instead, new members of each board of scientific counselors be recommended by a vote of the current members, although nominations might come from the scientific director, the deputy director for intramural research, and others. The actual invitation to join the board would come jointly from the deputy director and the chairperson of the board and no longer from the scientific director. In addition to reviewing the science program at a given institute, the more-independent board of scientific counselors would also review the performance of the scientific director every four years and vote on whether to recommend that person for a new four-year term. A major criterion for evaluation of the scientific director, the report states, would be the extent to which he or she considered or implemented the recommendations of the board of scientific counselors with regard to resource allocation to individual scientists. The review results would be sent to the deputy director for intramural research, who would then make a recommendation to the institute director overseeing the scientific director. "One of the criticisms that we've had over the past several years," NIH director Varmus said at the news conference, "is that the boards of scientific counselors may be too closely wedded to the very groups they're being asked to review. And, while this advisory function has worked well in many cases, there is the general belief that it may not be as stringent as the extramural peer-review process in which there is, perhaps, less fraternalism." The report also suggests the creation of a new committee, composed of the chairpersons of these strengthened boards and chaired by the deputy director for intramural research. The aim of the committee would be to encourage more uniformity across NIH in the scientific-review process. According to the report, the intramural program has a fragmented federated structure with inadequate processes for oversight. While one result of this structure has been diversity and vitality, it has also led to unevenness in quality, quality control, and productivity. "One of the things that the [external advisory] committee was concerned about is that the NIH has become overly Balkanized," said committee cochairman Paul A. Marks, also president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York. "In that sense, it's lost the ability to have quality as a primary basis for decision-making with regard to appointments, promotions, and program support." Another recommendation is to create a new NIH-wide tenure committee of 12 to 16 senior scientists to approve tenure appointments, introducing a new emphasis on peer evaluation into that process. The present procedure is for a board of the scientific directors to approve tenure decisions. Other suggestions in the report include: encouraging intramural program trainees to leave NIH after their two- to four-year programs to continuously provide space for new trainees; limiting the overall intramural budget in the future to its current level of about 11.3 percent of the total NIH budget; and reducing the NIH clinical center hospital from 450 beds to 250. Administrative response to the report's suggestions has been positive. On June 2, the standing advisory committee to NIH director Varmus, of which the external advisory committee was a subcommittee, will meet and, likely, formally approve the report. Already, Varmus said, he and Gottesman were meeting with institute directors and scientific directors to lay the groundwork for putting the recommendations into effect. The changes in the tenure system, for example, have already been approved by the necessary NIH officials, Gottesman said, although approval from NIH's parent organization, the Public Health Service (PHS), required for personnel policy changes, is pending. "We have a certain sense of optimism," said Marks, "that these recommendations--some of which have been on the books for a number of years--may be implemented this time around." The committee's feeling, Marks said, stemmed from the "explicit support" voiced not only by Varmus, Gottesman, and other top NIH administrators, but also by Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary Philip R. Lee, who oversees PHS, and department secretary Donna E. Shalala. "There has been, at least in some quarters, the perception that perhaps there's been some slippage in quality of the intramural program," Varmus told reporters when the report was released, acknowledging widespread concerns about the program (see, for example, J. Cohen, Science, 261:1120-7, 1993). Indeed, while a recent study of citations to scientific papers published by NIH researchers shows the intramural program commanding about 30 percent more citations than expected for comparable papers, it also shows a gradual overall decline in citation impact beginning in the late 1980s. Significant drops can be seen at specific institutes, such as the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Eye Institute. A few institutes appear to be growing stronger in recent years, such as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The study, produced by ISI (ScienceWatch, 5[3]:1, March 1994), compared actual citations to NIH papers against the expected number for papers of the same type (such as article, review, or note) published in the same journal and year. Scientific directors say there are different ways to interpret these data trends, although most accept that they are not artifacts and that there are problems that need to be addressed. Arthur S. Levine, scientific director at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, for example, says the problems at NIH are "structural" in nature. "The NIH and its intramural program are no longer experiencing the geometric, if not exponential, growth that they had in their previous history," Levine says. "At the same time, because senior scientists at the NIH, essentially, have lifetime positions, the work force is beginning to gray. So, the resources are now saturated. We are not adding new buildings by the day, and we are not adding new positions by the day. The money is staying flat. We have a closed box, and the people in it are not experiencing a great deal of turnover at the senior level. That is a situation that, structurally, invites the possibility of slippage." One remedy, Levine says, is to help NIH to grow again, but this does not seem likely in the current economic climate. "The second remedy is to make sure that our senior scientists are very rigorously peer-reviewed and that we don't hesitate to move resources from less productive to more productive scientists," Levine says, agreeing with the aims of the report. "That's a way of bringing in a continual supply of young investigators and of giving them a chance to grow and realize their full potentials." Levine cautions against overreacting to indicators such as the citation study. "The intramural program continues to be quite vital now, but it won't be quite vital 10 years from now if these structural remedies are not developed," he says. "I don't think the intramural program is in deep trouble at the moment, but we see the early warning signs." George R. Martin is scientific director at NIA, a post he took in late 1988 after a number of years as a lab chief at NIDR. NIA is one of the institutes whose citations have declined most noticeably since the mid-1980s. Martin says that significant, long-term improvements in NIA's scientific programs have been put in place since then and that these will take time to develop to the point at which they attract notice and citations, reversing the apparent downward trend. This is especially true, he says, for a number of talented young investigators recruited to NIA in recent years to study the basic biology of aging. New areas of research include studies of DNA repair in individual genes and work on mitochondrial DNA deletion, as well as fundamental research on the vascular system, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's disease. These researchers have their most productive years still ahead of them, he says. "We've developed 10 or 12 major new projects of this sort over the last half-dozen years, where we think the work is very important to the area of aging," Martin says. "The downside of this, when you bring in these younger people, is that those programs take three, five, seven years to mature, until they start to produce the types of results--and citations--that you expect. I can tell you, as a manager, I'm happy with the state of things and not so concerned about the citations index, because those will come along." Echoing Levine, Martin says that some of the intramural program's current problems have specific historical underpinnings. For example, he says, many of the best scientists now at NIH came to the institutes as young medical researchers during the Vietnam War era, because they could legally avoid war duties by doing so. "They could do research instead of being stuck in some hell hole where they'd be doing physical exams," Martin says. "The NIH could compete better for people who had clinical training and were also interested in research careers. Nowadays, they don't have access to those types of people, because the NIH underpays, as does the government generally." Gail H. Cassell, chairwoman of the department of microbiology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and cochairwoman with Marks of the external committee that produced the advisory committee report, says it is important to remember that the overall intramural program remains quite strong. "Yes, there has been a decline with some few institutes, [and] ones that have declined markedly," she acknowledges. "But the thing that is phenomenal is that many of them are still way above the average in what one might expect."

NIH Insiders Hopeful That New Measures Will Improve Intramural Research Efforts

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