Science Grants

WASHINGTON-A new program at the National Science Foundation will give institutions a larger voice in training researchers in the life sciences. The initiative, which NSF plans to launch with a $4 million investment next year, is also aimed at stimulating interdisciplinary research in the nation’s universities. Called the Research Training Group Awards, the program is sponsored by the NSF’s Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences (BBS) directorate. The foundation hopes to award each of 10 universities a total of $1.5 million over five years for student stipends, tuition, specialized equipment, and supporting materials. The training can focus on undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral-level programs, but it must “create new or significantly enhanced multidisciplinary educational opportunities” as well as provide access to state-of-the-art laboratory research equipment. Training awards, in which universities received grants to support students of their choice, were once the norm for NSF. In 1966, for example, they accounted for 4,200 of the 6,800 awards to graduate students and were distributed to 191 of 200 institutions deemed eligible for these programs. But the traineeships were phased out in the I 970s because of a perceived surplus of Ph.D. scientists. The bulk of the money NSF now provides to some 20,000 budding scientists comes either from its research fellowships, in which graduate students compete for individual three-year grants, or through grants to senior investigators that contain slots for junior researchers. However, with looming shortages in scientific talent, the National Science Board, the] foundation’s governing body, wants to resume support for institutional—based programs. “If you have individual fellowships, there’s no great incentive for institutions to extol the virtues of graduate education,” explains board member Daniel C. Drucker, graduate research professor of engineering science at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The incentive to recruit is much smaller.” Under the present system, students receiving NSF fellowships are free to work and study at any institution. Drucker says the new funds should make universities work harder to attract bright students into science and engineering because they will be assured of keeping them on campus. But the new training awards will do more than fill the science pipeline. Within the life sciences, the number of scientists is less of a problem than is the need for scientists with the breadth of insight to tackle today’s problems. Two years ago, the BBS directorate set up a Biological Research Centers program to stimulate better integration of research approaches. That program was crippled by budget cuts and later usurped by the foundation-wide Science and Technology Centers program. But the direction taken by its three finalists shows how serious institutions are about supporting interdisciplinary training. The three-centers—at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Arizona, Tucson—have funneled much of their grants to students rather than to senior scientists. “We felt it [training] was at the heart of our program," says Eaton Lattman, associate professor of biophysics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The program spawned the Institute for Biophysical Studies - of Macromolecular Assemblies, which involves 18 investigators across two campuses, four divisions, and nine departments. And 93% of the total, four-year $2.2 million NSF grant (a cut from the $4 million it invested) goes for training. Of all the factors that promote collaboration, students and training are the best,” says Lattman. “They are much more mobile than heads of labs.” Institutional training grants are also a more efficient way to support students, says Lattman. NSF receives a large number of applications for each available fellowship, and the cost of reviewing them all and picking out the most worthy candidates is high. In addition, the administrative overhead is costly because few universities have more than a handful of students on such fellowships. Although the National Science Board approved the new training program without dissent at its August meeting, NSF officials have decided to move cautiously. “It’s not something we want to institute across the board,” says director Erich Bloch. Each discipline has its own way of training students, he says, and what’s right for one may not apply to other areas. The program is slated for the current fiscal year, which began October 1, although NSF is still waiting for Congress to pass its budget for the year. In 1989, the BBS directorate supported 1,970 graduate students and 848 postdoctoral fellowships on research grants or through individual awards. “Before, there was an emphasis on the quality of the trainee,” says Gerald Selzer, program director in the BBS Division of Instrumentation and Resources. “Now we’re looking at the quality and capability of the trainer.” Criteria include the quality of the research, the number and quality of students trained, the educational and research opportunities available, and the interdisciplinary nature of the institution. In the meantime, some scientists are concerned that the new approach portends yet another shift toward bioscience by giving greater authority over research purse strings to institutions and less to individual investigators. While NSF officials insist that its many fellowship programs for graduate and postdoctoral researchers will not suffer—indeed, the agency hopes to double the number of grants to individuals—they admit they want to stimulate a more organized approach to interdisciplinary education. Notes Selzer, “we would like to see something that is occurring at the institutional level.” " Even with an institutional approach, however, it is not clear that the program can accomplish everything that NSF officials hope for, Standing in their way is the traditional bias for disciplinary studies. Complains Ronald Pulliam, who heads an interuniversity, interdisciplinary Institute of Ecology based at the University of Georgia, “Some departments basically tell us they won’t support our students under any circumstance." Yet others see hope for change. “So many areas of biology are already becoming interdisciplinary,” says Richard G. Wiegert, professor of zoology at the University of Georgia in Athens, “and I think that trend is going to accelerate.” The trend is already clear to the community served by the National Institutes of Health, which this year is spending $204 million on 1,500 training grants. The seven training programs at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which spends $50 million at 200 institutions and accounts for two thirds of NIH’s support of graduate students.

Science Grants

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