“It won't matter ten years from now if the conventional wisdom is we should reinvest if we've discouraged the smartest, most talented young people from entering this field.”
The fact that the budget of the National Institutes of Health has remained stagnant for several years threatens to drive young researchers into other fields, according to a dire warning issued by a group of leading research universities.
In a report called “The Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk,” the universities, which include Brown University, Duke University, Harvard University, The Ohio State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, Vanderbilt University, and Partners Healthcare, argue that the failure to provide “consistent and robust” support could cause the nation to “lose a generation of young investigators to other careers and other countries.” That, they said, threatens to take with them a generation of promising research that could cure disease for millions for whom no cure currently exists.
The report follows up on a related report by a similar group of academic institutions in 2007 that argued stagnant NIH funding was slowing discovery and squandering the significant opportunities for breakthroughs that past investment has put within reach. Although the NIH’s $29.5 billion budget continues to keep the U.S. at the top of the heap in public funding of research, other countries are investing heavily in expanding their own biomedical research.
The NIH budget doubled between 1998 and 2003, but since then it’s dropped 13 percent in terms of real purchasing power. As a result, the universities said research progress has slowed, and leading researchers’ find new ideas are often unable to win funding. Today only one in 10 proposals win NIH funding on their first submission. Overall, NIH funds only one in four proposals today, down from one in three in 1999.
Kevin Casey, associate vice president of government affairs for Harvard University, was one of the organizers of the report. The Journal of Life Sciences’ Web Editor Daniel S. Levine recently spoke to Casey about the flat NIH budget, young researchers who are ready to call it quits, and the prospects for increased federal funding for biomedical research. Edited excerpts follow:
Q: The Broken Pipeline report follows a similar report last year that focused on the fruits of NIH-funded research. Why did you decide to focus on the plight of young researchers this year?
A: The first report was trying to capture what was actually accomplished with the doubling of the NIH budget. We interviewed 20 researchers, who were leaders in their field, and asked them what transformation occurred because of this huge infusion of funding with the genome being accomplished and stuff like that. What we heard was that their fields were transformed and the excitement was palpable about what was ahead for them.
We then asked about how flat funding was affecting their ability to capture the moment, so to speak. And then, we heard this sort of bipolar reaction, which was this sense of excitement about what was possible, and this despair about being unable to totally capture as quickly as they would like the fruits of that investment. That led to this focus that not only is this slowing science, but they feared was discouraging young investigators who were watching their mentors struggle.
Q: Despite the flattening of the NIH budget, federal funding for biomedical research is still significant. At the same time, there’s been growing concern about the low level of new drug approvals as a sign that we’re not getting enough bang for the buck. What’s the case to be made for NIH funded research? What’s been our return on investment?
A: I think the return has been exceptional and portends to be even better because of the personalization of therapies we are looking at in areas such as cancer, because of genomics and the manipulation of proteins enabled by powerful new tools, and the completion of the sequencing of the genome. That’s opened up an entirely new world for researchers.
There is definitely a growing gap between basic research in universities and pre-clinical research that pharmaceuticals or investors would go into. There is no doubt that academic institutions are about basic research and there needs to be something that bridges what academic institutions are producing, foments it to the point where investors will feel more comfortable taking the risk to invest before it gets to pharmaceuticals. This is something that NIH, institutions themselves, such as Harvard, and folks out on the West Coast are looking at. It’s not what this report was about, but it’s a legitimate question.
Q: In recent Congressional testimony around this topic, one of the participants in the report made reference to a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine that stated biomedical research has never experienced a recession of this magnitude of duration. How dire is the situation?
A: If you took a glide path of 40 years of NIH funding, the average increase in funding over the course of that time would reflect around 7 to 8 percent increases. There was this huge investment at the turn of the century, but if President Bush’s budget was adopted, you’d be seeing the sixth consecutive year of essentially flat budgets. That is really affecting the ability to fund continuing ongoing programs.
Right now, anecdotal evidence tells us almost no first submissions are approved anymore. They have so many piles of residual left over applications that have great merit. It’s only after a second or third resubmission of a rewriting of the rejected grant once and most likely twice over a two-year period.
Q: In terms of real dollars, how has the flat budget affected where we are historically with the NIH budget? Have we come close to wiping out the increases we saw when the budget doubled in that five year period from 1998 to 2002?
A: We’re getting close to being back to where we would have been in the second year of the doubling. You never lose the scientific punch that the investment has made, but right now we are eroding the buying power of harvesting that.
What this report is trying to get at is that it won’t matter ten years from now if the conventional wisdom is we should reinvest if we’ve discouraged the smartest, most talented young people from entering this field. There needs to be some sense there’s a career path here or else these young people are smart and will go to other fields. You can’t go from zero to 60 and recapture that, if we decide as a country that it’s important to restart the engine.
Q: The flattening of the budget aside, do you think the report argues, unintentionally or not, that NIH ought to set aside a portion of its grants monies to fund young researchers?
A: They actually are doing that. They have reestablished some programs to try to fund some young researcher grants that used to exists before. You might have noticed Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced they are going to fund 70 young investigators. But the numbers are so small that it’s hard to move the needle. There needs to be a consistency in the funding trajectory. What you need is certainty, and a point or two above inflation on a regular basis is sort of what is necessary to keep progress going.
Q: I know that there aren’t hard numbers to point to, but how much evidence is there that we’re actually seeing promising young researchers decide to walk away from the profession?
A: At the press conference for the report that question came up. One of the young researchers talked about how in her graduate school class she had 32 classmates in the medical and research field and only two elected to go into the medical research rather than other areas. All of the researchers we talked to talked about a growing sentiment among their colleagues that they were looking at industry and other options. They also talked about their students. All of these people are teaching, so there is this cascading impact.
Q: The proposed budget from the White House reflects a zero increase in the NIH budget. What level of funding are top research universities advocating?
A: The research community this year has galvanized for this budget session around a 6.7 percent increase. This report does not land on a number. What it says is we believe the country, as it consistently has done in the past, should fund NIH research at a steady, reasonable increase above inflation for the long haul. Right now biomedical inflation is around 3.8 percent. Over the long haul, we think that a couple of points above biomedical inflation—about 2 percent above that—seems to be something that allows sustaining ongoing programs and allowing new ideas and new risk.
Q: Obviously, few people would argue against the benefits of biomedical research, but what’s the political reality with our pursuit of two wars, a housing meltdown and financial institutions in need of bailouts?
A: Certainly there are a huge number of competing interests. We view it as our role to inform policymakers of what is actually going on with NIH funding. It is up to Congress to make those choices. It is our job to inform Congress and the public as much as we can about what the impacts may be for a program we think has broad public support.
Q: What do you think the likelihood is that you will have the support you need to push this through?
A: It was encouraging last week that the senate added a budget amendment that suggested they were interested in adding almost $2 billion on top of the president’s budget for biomedical research funding. However, the fact of budget life on Capitol Hill, because of the size of the NIH budget, is if the president does not adopt it as a priority, it is really hard for the champions on the Hill to actually fill that hole.
We’re hoping that 6.7 percent that Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are fighting for is achievable, but we saw what happened last year and it was a message to us that we need to try to make this a priority of the three remaining presidential candidates in their first budget that is submitted to Congress. We hope a flag is put in the ground on biomedical research.