FLICKR, PICTURES OF MONEYMany members of the biomedical science community are voicing their displeasure that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has decided to abandon a plan to limit the federal funding flowing to individual researchers. More than 950 researchers have signed an online petition that asks the NIH to reconsider its decision to move away from a new program, called the Grant Support Index (GSI), which it floated earlier this year.
The GSI was designed to institute a point system that would ensure that the federal agency spread its funds around to more scientists, rather than having that money pool in the coffers of established and well-funded investigators.
Critics claimed that the study used to support the GSI, which established a connection between increasing NIH funding and lab productivity, was flawed. The NIH decided to scrap the GSI program in June.
But signers of the petition, launched by Mark Peifer, a cell biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to reinstate the GSI program say that the spirit of the policy was good for the biomedical research enterprise. “The reversal of the GSI policy suggests that a small number of powerful scientists can drive ...
