Apparently the increase in NIH funding had no effect on the rate of publishing new biomedical data.
The lack of correlation between the publication rate and the budget is further supported by the fact that after 2003, when the budget flattened, the publication rate showed no inflection, positive or negative.

This analysis is not inherently insensitive, since over the same period of time there was an enormous increase in publications originating from China. The trend to publish more articles over time seems to reflect the activity of the journal publishers rather than the science, since the number of indexed journals increased from 4500 to 6500 between 1994 and 2006.

Perhaps publication rate is not a good index of productivity and papers now contain twice the information as they did in 1996. That is hard to judge, but analysis of the literature suggest otherwise [1-7]. Discussion of the apparent lack of correlation between funding and productivity with NIH representatives led to the suggestion that there is a significant latency between funding and productivity. If this latency is on the order of ten years, then it seems inappropriate to fund grants for only three.

The best data on US research quality is available at the NIH where the scientific quality of grant applications is judged to three significant figures more than 50,000 times a year. I encourage the NIH to make that data available.

The lack of correlation between funding and publication rate does not suggest that the NIH is funding bad science, but that NIH is not spending its money efficiently. We need to encourage more students to enter science as a career, if for no other reason than young faculty must publish to survive. While senior scientists may do the most competent and voluminous work, revolutionary ideas tend to come from the young [8]. Currently there is little incentive for American students to enter a scientific career. The average age of an applicant to obtain their first independent NIH grant is 43, and there is currently > 85% chance of rejection for each application. According to the director of NIH, doubling of the NIH budget led to a paradoxical decrease in the grant funding rate [8]. The difficulty of getting funded is particularly frustrating for young faculty in research universities where tenure is decided primarily by grant funding.

What did happen to all the extra money that flowed into the NIH [8]? Was it used for clinical trials [3,9]? Was it absorbed by inflation? [8]. Wherever the funds went, they left no clear scientific record.

Reference List

1. Ioannidis J.P.A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. Plos Medicine 2: 696-701.
2. Ioannidis J.P.A. (2005). Contradictions in highly cited clinical research – Reply. Jama-Journal of the American Medical Association 294: 2696.
3. Marks A.R. (2006). Rescuing the NIH before it is too late. J Clin Invest 116: 844.
4. Butler D. and Hogan J. (2007). Modellers seek reason for low retraction rates. Nature 447: 236-237.
5. [Anon] (2006). Correction or retraction? Nature 444: 123-124.
6. Abbott A. and Schwarz J. (2002). Dubious data remain in print two years after misconduct inquiry. Nature 418: 113.
7. Lawrence P.A. (2007). The mismeasurement of science. Current Biology 17: R583-R585.
8. Zerhouni E.A. (2006). Research funding – NIH in the post-doubling era: Realities and strategies. Science 314: 1088-1090.
9. Marks A.R. (2006). Rescuing the NIH: the response. J Clin Invest 116: 1460-1461.

For any readers who feel that they are not sufficiently “up” on NIH funding issues…please, please do not let this dissuade you from offering opinion, should you have it. At the very least you are a consumer of the fruits of the NIH mission, if in the US a taxpayer funding it. And didn’t you read “The rats of NIMH” at least once???

The NIH request for information means you too…

And for grad students / postdocs and recently transitioned faculty, well, it is YOUR voice that is most missing from the process. Is it any wonder your grievances are so poorly addressed?

However, yes, a big lab is like a company in that the head gets disproportional credit and the worker bees get little. It is a debate as to whether there is an exploitative bait and switch. Are technician salaries our benchmark, at least for grad students? Well, grad students get paid less, generally, bought off with the promise of a career. For some fraction this is a scam or, at least, a willing gamble. Post-doctoral workers are a trickier case because of the intellectual input more similar to the PI level. Middle management gets paid less than the CEO, I fear, even if the CEO spends his time on the golf course. PIs flit around the country and world and spend the rest of the time on the phone-does this really contribute as much as the scientists back home to the eventual product? likely not.

what’s the solution, assuming this is a problem? returning to one PI and one trainee laboring side by side at the bench? not a big fan myself, but then I don’t have any good criteria for how big is too big and how exploitative is too exploitative.

as a caveat, I trained mostly in very small labs and never really felt exploited scientifically, intellectually or whatever. I was grumpy about the uncertain career prospects like anyone. I had some significant setbacks, sure. But I was never really in one of these giant depersonalized labs so YMMV.

With respect to “just give us the proper budget”, well, sure I agree that our public dollars are better spent on the NIH than elsewhere. But we also have to face the fact that Congress is not likely to heed the scientists on this anytime soon. So why not use this time of pressure and hand wringing to advance some agenda? After all, when times are good, nobody wants to change the system either. Take the current worry about young investigators. The doubling worsened the situation because most of the gains went to expanding the operations of established investigators, permitted universities to shirk their responsibilities in paying salaries and some infrastructure costs, etc.

…IMHO, the systematic overproduction of PhDs and postdocs. Until the current pyramid scheme is replaced with a career ladder, the grant process is always going to serve as the limiting factor to continued growth. I’d disagree with the claim that there’s no room for improvement, but ultimately, as PhysioProf says, it’s not the real problem.

Notes:
1) I’m new here and have no idea if you’ve discussed this issue before.

2) I did drop a note to the NIH about this after Zerhouni’s “The NIH budget was doubled, the number of applicants doubled and now we’re back where we started. This is completely inexplicable, so you’d better double our funding again!” article in Science.