Plant Science Field In Need Of Healthier Funding Climate

Plant science gets short shrift when it comes to research funding compared to the booming biomedical field, say many in the discipline, especially in light of the fact that through photosynthesis, plants are the source of life on earth. According to a recent government report, most funding goes toward research on agricultural problems and pests. The report says that research on plant genetics, biochemistry, and physiology in the United States needs help to avoid being trapped in a downward spiral of decreased funding, declining opportunities, and, ultimately, abandonment of the field by promising graduate students. "The concern is for people getting started," says Elaine Tobin, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is studying gene expression in plants. Tobin says that recently one of her more talented graduate students struggled with his decision over whether to continue in plant science in spite of the adverse research funding climate. She says he ultimately decided to stay in the field, but soon after making that decision awoke with a nightmare, wondering if he should be going into a more lucrative biomedical area, such as oncogenes. Such nightmares are not groundless. Gene manipulation techniques have spilled over into plant research, boosting interest in the field (see accompanying story), and yet funding is tighter than ever, she says. The $2 billion in research funding funneled through the U.S. Department of Agriculture is dwarfed by the $9 billion budget for the National Institutes of Health, translating to less attention for the field. But this is not the only problem. According to Tobin, very little of the USDA money goes toward truly peer-reviewed, basic science. "The USDA doesn't spend an appropriate proportion of the funds on basic research," she says. "USDA throws away money on noncompetitive grants," says another university researcher, speaking on condition of anonymity. This feeling is echoed by many in plant science, who say the money channeled by Congress through USDA is largely "pork barrel" and produces little quality science. And even the White House says there is too much pork in the USDA diet. In March President Bush proposed trimming back such USDA "special research grants" as the ones for studies on Appalachian hardwoods, on asparagus and celery molds in Michigan, and on urban pests in Georgia. These grants are considered pork barrel because funding for them is inserted into the budget without subjecting the research proposals to peer review, which the administration says they would never have passed. The National Research Council, via a report released in June, was critical of the way plant science funds are parceled out by USDA. The report especially took issue with the fact that the majority of the agency's research budget goes to land grant universities, which in turn dole out funds to their own researchers, and to intramural research at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service labs scattered across the country. Peer review within these institutions is "seldom as rigorous" as peer review at NIH or NSF. "The members of this committee are convinced that the U.S. research effort in plant biology is not keeping pace with biomedically related fields because of defective mechanisms used for support as well as the small financial commitment to research and training in plant sciences," according to the report, entitled "Plant Biology Research and Training for the 21st Century." Ann Datko, a plant biochemist and division director for the National Research Initiative (NRI), an office within USDA that administers competitive grants, agrees that the amount of money freely available to researchers outside the USDA network of land grant universities and labs is minuscule. "The NRI is the only place at USDA where anyone can apply and it's truly competitive," she says. NRI was funded by Congress at $97.5 million for fiscal year 1992, or just 5 percent of the overall agriculture department funding, and was held at that level for FY 1993. The only other major source of competitive plant research grants is the National Science Foundation, which awards about $70 million annually. In addition, the Department of Energy (DOE) provides about $18 million for studies of the uses of plants in energy production. Datko says the majority of the NRI funds goes to basic research. Other research components of USDA, such as the Agricultural Research Service, is peer-reviewed but available only to USDA employees. Other funds go to land grant colleges through agricultural extension services, with matching state funds. But, because the emphasis is on solving local agricultural problems, the research tends to be very applied. "We've never had the luxury of doing basic research to accumulate the large body of basic knowledge that can be called upon when needed," Datko says. By contrast, AIDS research has gotten a enormous boost from the solid background in virology and human immunology already on tap. Because plant science funding goes to land grant colleges or to the USDA itself, and most of this for applied problems, plant biologists tend to be isolated from the biologists doing animal and human studies, according to the NRC report. In fact, only 16 percent of academic plant biologists are at universities that ranked among the 20 universities receiving the most federal support for life sciences. "The stunting of plant sciences at a time when other fields are experiencing rapid growth initiates a self-perpetuating downward spiral in the plant sciences," says the report. "As universities restructure traditional botany, zoology, and microbiology departments into thematic departments that cut across organismal boundaries, plant biology loses academic positions to fields with access to the much larger funding bases of the biomedical support structure." "In plant sciences right now, we are at a very exciting stage with the new tools of molecular biology," says Charles Hess, a horticulturist at University of California, Davis, who until recently was assistant secretary for science and education at USDA. "Yet, the enrollment in the plant sciences across the country continues to drop. Young men and women aren't going into the plant sciences." The problems in funding for basic research and training of the next generation of plant scientists could seriously damage America's nascent agricultural biotechnology sector, says one biotechnology research director. "Our R&D budget has become more D and less R," says Vic Knaus, vice president of research for Davis, Calif.-based Calgene Inc. "We're doing less basic research at Calgene than we have in our history." So, Knaus says, Calgene will increasingly depend on innovations coming out of the universities. He called the difficulty young investigators are having getting research grants "the rate-limiting factor for the biotech industry." Ian Baldwin, a plant biologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is keenly aware of this rate-limiting factor. After submitting 18 proposals since 1989, primarily to USDA and NSF, he began receiving outside funding for his work only this year. He has received a five-year Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF, with matching funds from industry, to study plant defenses against insect damage, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to study germination, and an NSF physiological ecology grant to study how plants partition and recycle nitrogen in growthand defense-related molecules. "The funding situation is pretty abysmal," he says. Baldwin sat on a recent USDA grant-proposal review panel, reviewing 250 proposals. Of this group, about half had sufficient merit to "definitely be funded," but he says, "not very many" will be. "And that means so much good science is not being funded." Baldwin agrees with the report's finding that there is a downward spiral at work in plant science. "What's happening is we're losing an entire generation of people who know anything about plant anatomy and morphology," he says. Many people are coming into plant biology from other fields--analytical chemistry in his case, but more often molecular biology. What they aren't bringing is a strong background in plant anatomy and botany, he says. And the generation of researchers with that background is nearing retirement. "There has to be a reorganization of plant training to launch this new set of students. If you establish training centers, you can reinvigorate those plant biologists [with classical training] back into training students," he says. The NRC report has its own remedy for pulling plant science research out of its nosedive--a National Institute of Plant Biology, to lead a coordinated federal plant biology research program. But this proposal elicits mostly groans from the scientific community. "I was disappointed in that as a recommendation," says NSF assistant director Mary Clutter, who commissioned the report. "I don't know whether it's needed, but it seems to me that any time a group can't think of what to do they suggest a new institute." Clutter cites, for example, a National Institute on the Environment, which often has been proposed (Christine Mlot, The Scientist, July 23, 1990, page 4), but so far has gone nowhere. "Plant biology isn't doing as well as it should," she says, adding that there's a lot of basic knowledge about plant biochemistry and physiology that's missing. But how to make it up? Clutter does agree with the report's recommendation that grants for plant biology research should be larger and longer-term. NSF, DOE, and USDA grants tend to be less than $100,000 per year for a twoto three-year term, while NIH grants tend to be four years in length and average about $170,000 per year. But getting more money for research will be difficult. Reapportioning the agriculture budget is not popular with congressional representatives because it means less money for land grant universities and USDA research labs in their districts. The purpose of the report was not so much to bemoan the plant research situation in the U.S., but to point out that the funding mechanisms are "outmoded and need to be revisited," says Robert Goodman, the University of Wisconsin plant physiologist who chaired the NRC report committee. "I also think the agricultural research system is insular and closed and needs to be opened up." However, he doesn't see the situation getting any better overnight. "I don't expect this single report to have solo impact, but I hope it will be used in congressional committees," says Goodman. A number of committees are expected to take up the funding issue this fall, he says. But advocates of increased funding for basic plant science should not expect a sympathetic ear from the Senate agriculture committee, says one congressional aide. That committee is currently of the mind that too much basic and not enough focused, mission-oriented science is going on both within and outside USDA. Hearings slated for this fall will look into whether NRI is funding too much basic research, says the aide, contravening the terms of the 1990 Farm Bill, which specified more multidisciplinary and mission-oriented research than is apparently being funded.

Plant Science Field In Need Of Healthier Funding Climate

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