U.S. Funding Shortfall Undermines Investment In Training Scientists

After spending $200,000 in assistance for each Ph.D., the government offers long odds to researchers setting up on their own WASHINGTON - In her youth, Patricia McGraw studied music and as a teenager was a concert pianist. These past nine years, though, she has studied science and now is an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Maryland Baltimore County Campus. As a pianist she worried about improving her musical prowess. As a scientist, she sometimes wonders whether she will be able to keep practicing her profession at all. Her education - graduate school and postdoctoral training - was financed primarily through training, fellowship, and research grants from the National Institutes of Health. Now she hopes NIH will sponsor her first experiments as an independent scientist. But for new investigators like herself, the chances of success in getting that support are much less than one in four. "Now that they've got me all trained, they won't let me show them what I can do," says McGraw, who won't know until this fall whether her proposal will be funded. McGraw and thousands of other young researchers represent the nation's investment in its scientific future. It's an investment that some experts say is about to turn sour for lack of continued support. At the same time that the nation is facing an upcoming shortage of trained scientists, it is also struggling to find enough funds to keep labs thriving. The situation highlights the need for better manpower planning. "With the cost of training these students, to say it's a lottery and you may not have a laboratory in two years is crazy," says Donald Summers, chairman of cellular, viral, and molecular biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine. "The time has come now to re-evaluate and reprioritize." Who should do that is an open question, however. "Someone has to decide what the steady state of research should be compared to other things," adds Susan Henry, professor and head of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "There should be some relationship between the number trained and the number supported." But those numbers are elusive. A meeting earlier this month of the panel that advises the NIH director was devoted almost entirely to the issue of training. As part of that discussion, Rockefeller University executive vice president Rodney Nichols noted that part of the problem biomedical administrators face is not being able to quantify the situation. "We lack most of the data we need," said Nichols. "We talk about it a lot, but when it comes to answers it's all pretty guessy." Students rely on several mechanisms to finance their graduate education. Biomedical students can become trainees, with their stipends for part-time research coming from a large grant given to their institutions for that purpose. Some receive one of a myriad of fellowships from private or public sources. Many are sponsored by faculty as research assistants and are paid through regular research grants. In addition, most spend at least one semester as teaching assistants. It can be a monastic life of relative poverty, with many students scraping by on annual incomes of about $10,000 a year. But that wage is just the tip of the iceberg of the cost to support them. The true cost is more than twice that, says Henry. She estimates that each researcher needs about $5,000 in supplies a year and that tuition costs another $10,000. Thus, a student who takes five years to earn a Ph.D. costs about $125,000 to train. "Getting a job in our discipline takes three to five years as a postdoc," adds Henry. That adds another $25,000 to $30,000 per year, plus $5,000 annually in supplies. "The total cost is in excess of $200,000," she concludes. "And virtually all of it is public money." When these young scientists get jobs, their institutions promise them up to $500,000 for renovated lab space, new equipment, and start-up funds. What those investigators then need, estimates James Wyngaarden, the former director of NIH, is about $75,000 a year for three to five years. That level of support, plus larger amounts thereafter, will enable them to set up and operate a competitive research program, he says. A few scientists will obtain that support, but for the majority of investigators, their chances are slim and, consequently, so is the likelihood of their success. "The first two grants are really tough to get," says Elizabeth Jones, professor of genetics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and, in 1991, the chair of an NIH study section. "You're not very savvy and there's not very much time [to collect data] between getting the first grant and applying for the second. And the competition is tremendous. I know a lot of people who are coming up for their first renewals and not making it." Elizabeth Jones is a little ambivalent about her profession these days. A well-established geneticist who will soon become chair of a study section at NIH, she struggles to improve her younger colleagues' chances for success in the lab. The low funding rates, the emphasis on large-scale projects, and the pressures of her work have dampened her enthusiasm and made her more pragmatic. At one time, she encouraged young scientists to use postdoctoral fellowships to broaden their interests or explore a different sort of project. But now Jones tells her students to pick postdoctoral fellowships that offer projects that are portable - ones that can be taken with them and built upon when it's time to set up their own labs and apply for that first grant. The price for taking this approach can be creativity. "I'm acting in an extremely schizophrenic way," she says. "I try to protect them from seeing it [the reality]. If we let them get a really good glimpse of what's going on, why should they [want to] go into it?" Too often, say scientists like Jones, the training potential of research grants is overlooked. Like many scientists, much of her grant money goes toward supporting the next generation of researchers. Her $250,000 NIH grant includes $60,000 for student stipends, another $30,000 to cover their tuitions, as well as money to pay the salaries of two postdoctoral fellows. After all that time and money invested, she hates the thought that her proteges might not succeed. If they fail to obtain funding, she laments, "all of the 10 years you spent in training them is down the drain." She and others argue that the community's interests might be served better by limiting the amount of grant money given to any one scientist (The Scientist, April 16, 1990, page 1). Those labs turn out lots of data, she admits, but not always lots of broadly educated scientists. For that reason, many investigators are critical of the human genome initiative, which they fear is growing at the expense of other basic research budgets. "I think it [the money] will be spent extremely wastefully," says Jones. "It will have cataclysmic consequences for biomedical research projects in this country." Adds her colleague Susan Henry, "Sequencing the genome is the most rote kind of science. That's a terrible training program." --E.P. Such failures could doom a career in academia. "If they fail to get a research grant in two years, then their chances of getting tenure go down the tube," says Henry. Universities sometimes tide scientists over temporarily, she adds, but eventually they "will dump those people and hire the new crop coming out." Unfortunately, that new crop is likely to repeat the cycle. "I'm very nervous about it," says David Stillman, an assistant professor of cellular, viral, and molecular biology at the University of Utah. He has just applied for the first renewal of his grant, which supports two graduate students, a postdoctoral fellow, and a technician. Last year he applied for a new, second grant, but his application was not funded. Now he's pinning his hopes on a renewal of his initial grant. "I knew it would be competitive to get a faculty position," he says. "I didn't know about the competition for grants. I was a little naive." Although NIH says its overall funding rate is about 25 percent, a portion of its money is spent on large projects, centers, and other research that NIH has announced it wants to support. For the type of nontargeted research that is done by university scientists, however, Jones says the rate shrinks to about 10 percent. And no one really knows how young investigators fare. "The underfunding of assistant professors is something that is not studied very much," says Myles Boylan, a policy analyst at the National Science Foundation. "We just don't have very good data." The impressions from department heads and from young scientists themselves is that the situation is bleak. "For those of us who have been in the business for quite a long time, to get into the top 10 percent is tough," says Jones. "And we know how the system works. For these young scientists, it's crushing." She offers as an example an assistant professor who is scraping by with a small NSF grant. That professor's first NIH grant application "failed totally," she says, and has been resubmitted. In the meantime, the scientist is functioning at near-austerity levels. "That jeopardizes her because she has limited productivity," Jones says. Yet productivity is crucial for getting the data and the publications that she needs to increase her chances of getting a grant next time around. "They are very bright, very capable, even outstanding," says Utah's Summers. "But at a time they need to be building up their laboratories, they can't." Some of these scientists can't escape feeling bitter. "There was no manpower planning, not the slightest thought about what would happen at the end of the training," says Arthur Zachary about his initial career. Zachary studied marine bacteria at the University of Maryland for more than a decade before forsaking the lab for a position as a health administrator. "A whole generation of scientists that have been trained at the government's expense will be cut out of the pipeline," predicts Henry. "That's not consistent policy. I would prefer to train fewer people and know they would have jobs." Calls for consistent planning fall on many ears, some deaf. "The federal establishment is really an agglomeration of different agencies and units, all of whom do some of that [planning]," explains Boylan, who says that his agency alone has three divisions that try to assess future needs. "And during the last 10 years, there has not been a lot of coordination." But some observers are not sure more planning is the answer. "I think the system balances itself," says Norman Hackerman, former president and chemistry professor emeritus at Rice University and now scientific advisory board chairman of the Welch Foundation. "I think we ought to let the demand and need take care of itself. We must be sure not to organize it too tightly." It may not be possible - or desirable - to fine-tune the system, which requires that planners project research needs for the next 10 years. Also, agencies have traditionally built research budgets based on scientific opportunities, not with the goal of protecting or creating jobs. "It's never bothered me that we were training more scientists than we could support in research," says Wyngaarden. "There will always be some slippages." Although that approach may appear reasonable, if not frugal, the fear of "slipping" can be devastating to a scientist. "You have all these junior colleagues who have lost their funding or are nervous to the point of being nonfunctional," says Jones. "It saps their confidence." That confidence is needed as they try to push ahead the frontiers of knowledge. "The thing with research is you can work very hard, but there's no guarantee of success," says Zachary, who has felt the frustration of spending months in a futile attempt to work out a new procedure or come up with satisfactory results from his experiments. "I feel for people who are assistant professors. Those guys come into [the system] now, sweating from Day One."

U.S. Funding Shortfall Undermines Investment In Training Scientists

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of