The Director of the NIH and the Deputy Director in charge of the office of extramural research have posted a blog post about The Issue that Keeps Us Awake at Night. It is the plight of the young investigator, going from what they have written.
The Working Group is also wrestling with the issue that keeps us awake at night – considering how to make well-informed strategic investment decisions to nurture and further diversify the biomedical research workforce in an environment filled with high-stakes opportunity costs. If we are going to support more promising early career investigators, and if we are going to nurture meritorious, productive mid-career investigators by stabilizing their funding streams, monies will have to come from somewhere. That will likely mean some belt-tightening in other quarters, which is rarely welcomed by the those whose belts are being taken in by a notch or two.
They plan to address this by relying on data and reports that are currently being generated. I suspect this will not be enough to address their goal.
I recently posted a link to the NIH summary of their history of trying to address the smooth transition of newly minted PIs into NIH-grant funded laboratories, without much comment. Most of my Readers are probably aware by now that handwringing from the NIH about the fate of new investigators has been an occasional feature since at least the Johnson Administration. The historical website details the most well known attempts to fix the problem. From the R23 to the R29 FIRST to the New Investigator check box, to the “sudden realization”* they needed to invent a true Noob New Investigator (ESI) category, to the latest designation of the aforementioned ESIs as Early Established Investigators for continued breaks and affirmative action. It should be obvious from the ongoing reinvention of the wheel that the NIH periodically recognizes that the most recent fix isn’t working (and may have unintended detrimental consequences).
One of the reasons these attempts never truly work and have to be adjusted or scrapped and replaced by the next fun new attempt was identified by Zerhouni (a prior NIH Director) in about 2007. This was right after the “sudden realization” and the invention of the ESI. Zerhouni was quoted in a Science news bit as saying that study sections were responding to the ESI special payline boost by handing out ever worsening scores to the ESI applications.
Told about the quotas, study sections began “punishing the young investigators with bad scores,” says Zerhouni.
Now, I would argue that viewing this trend of worsening scores as “punishing” is at best only partially correct. We can broaden this to incorporate a simple appreciation that study sections adapt their biases, preferences and evolved cultural ideas about grant review to the extant rules. One way to view worsening ESI scores may have to do with the pronounced tendency reviewers have to think in terms of fund it / don’t fund it, despite the fact that SROs regularly exhort them not to do this. When I was on study section regularly, the scores tended to pile up around the perceived payline. I’ve seen the data for one section across multiple rounds. Reviewers were pretty sensitive to the scuttlebutt about what sort of score was going to be a fundable one. So it would be no surprise whatsoever to me if there was a bias driven by this tendency, once it was announced that ESI applications would get a special (higher) payline for funding.
This tendency might also be driven in part by a “Get in line, youngun, don’t get too big for your britches” phenomenon. I’ve written about this tendency a time or two. I came up as a postdoc towards the end of the R29 / FIRST award era and got a very explicit understanding that some established PIs thought that newbies had to get the R29 award as their first award. Presumably there was a worsening bias against giving out an R01 to a newly minted assistant professor as their first award**, because hey, the R29 was literally the FIRST award, amirite?
sigh.
Then we come to hazing, which is the even nastier relative of the “Don’t get to big for your britches“. Oh, nobody will admit that it is hazing, but there is definitely a subcurrent of this in the review behavior of some people that think that noob PIs have to prove their worth by battling the system. If they sustain the effort to keep coming back with improved versions, then hey, join the club kiddo! (Here’s an ice pack for the bruising). If the PI can’t sustain the effort to submit a bunch of revisions and new attempts, hey, she doesn’t really have what it takes, right? Ugh.
Scientific gate-keeping. This tends to cover a multitude of sins of various severity but there are definitely reviewers that want newcomers to their field to prove that they belong. Is this person really an alcohol researcher? Or is she just going to take our*** money and run away to do whatever basic science amazeballs sounded super innovative to the panel?
Career gate-keeping. We’ve gone many rounds on this one within the science blog- and twittospheres. Who “deserves” a grant? Well, reviewers have opinions and biases and despite their best intentions and wounded protestations…these attitudes affect review. In no particular order we can run down the favorite targets of the “Do it to Julia, not me, JULIA!” sentiment. Soft money job categories. High overhead Universities. Well funded labs. Translational research taking all the money away from good honest basic researchers***. Elite coastal Universities. Big Universities. R1s. The post-normative-retirement crowd. Riff-raff plodders.
Layered over the top of this is favoritism. It interacts with all of the above, of course. If some category of PI is to be discriminated against, there is very likely someone getting the benefit. The category of which people approve. Our club. Our kind. People who we like who must be allowed to keep their funding first, before we let some newbie get any sniff of a grant.
This, btw, is a place where the focus must land squarely on Program Officers as well. The POs have all the same biases mentioned above, of course. And their versions of the biases have meaningful impact. But when it comes to thought of “we must save our long term investigators” they have a very special role to play in this debacle. If they are not on board with the ESI worries that keep Collins and Lauer awake at night, well, they are ideally situated to sabotage the effort. Consciously or not.
So, Director Collins and Deputy Director Lauer, you have to fix study section and you have to fix Program if you expect to have any sort of lasting change.
I have only a few suggestions and none of this is a silver bullet.
I remain convinced that the only tried and true method to minimize the effects of biases (covert and overt) is the competition of opposing biases. I’ve remarked frequently that study sections would be improved and fairer if less-experienced investigators had more power. I think the purge of Assistant Professors effected by the last head of the CSR (Scarpa) was a mistake. I note that CSR is charged with balancing study sections on geography, sex, ethnicity, university type and even scientific subdomains…while explicitly discriminating against younger investigators. Is it any wonder if there is a problem getting the newcomers funded?
I suggest you also pay attention to fairness. I know you won’t, because administrators invariably respond to a situation of perceived past injustice with “ok, that was the past and we can’t do anything about it, moving forward please!“. But this is going to limit your ability to shift the needle. People may not agree on what represents fair treatment but they sure as heck are motivated by fairness. Their perception of whether a new initiative is fair or unfair will tend to shape their behavior when reviewing. This can get in the way of NIH’s new agenda if reviewers perceive themselves as being mistreated by it.
Many of the above mentioned reviewer quirks are hardened by acculturation. PIs who are asked to serve on study section have been through the study section wringer as newbies. They are susceptible to the idea that it is fair if the next generation has it just about as hard as they did and that it is unfair if newbies these days are given a cake walk. Particularly, if said established investigators feel like they are still struggling. Ahem. It may not seem logical but it is simple psychology. I anticipate that the “Early Established Investigator” category is going to suffer the same fate as the ESI category. Scores will worsen, compared to pre-EEI days. Some of this will be the previously mentioned tracking of scores to the perceived payline. But some of this will be people**** who missed the ESI assistance who feel that it is unfair that the generation behind them gets yet another handout to go along with the K99/R00 and ESI plums. The intent to stabilize the careers of established investigators is a good one. But limiting this to “early” established investigators, i.e., those who already enjoyed the ESI era, is a serious mistake.
I think Lauer is either aware, or verging on awareness, of something that I’ve mentioned repeatedly on this blog. I.e. that a lot of the pressure on the grant system- increasing numbers of applications, PIs seemingly applying greedily for grants when already well funded, they revision queuing traffic pattern hold – comes from a vicious cycle of the attempt to maintain stable funding. When, as a VeryEstablished colleague put it to me suprisingly recently “I just put in a grant when I need another one and it gets funded” is the expected value, PIs can be efficient with their grant behavior. If they need to put in eight proposals to have a decent chance of one landing, they do that. And if they need to start submitting apps 2 years before they “need” one, the randomness is going to mean they seem overfunded now and again. This applies to everyone all across the NIH system. Thinking that it is only those on their second round of funding that have this stability problem is a huge mistake for Lauer and Collins to be making. And if you stabilize some at the expense of others, this will not be viewed as fair. It will not be viewed as shared pain.
If you can’t get more people on board with a mission of shared sacrifice, or unshared sacrifice for that matter, then I believe NIH will continue to wring its hands about the fate of new investigators for another forty years. There are too many applicants for too few funds. It amps up the desperation and amps up the biases for and against. It decreases the resistance of peer reviewers to do anything to Julia that they expect might give a tiny boost to the applications of them and theirs. You cannot say “do better” and expect reviewers to change, when the power of the grant game contingencies is so overwhelming for most of us. You cannot expect program officers who still to this day appear entirely clueless about they way things really work in extramural grant-funded careers to suddenly do better because you are losing sleep. You need to delve into these psychologies and biases and cultures and actually address them.
I’ll leave you with an exhortation to walk the earth, like Caine. I’ve had the opportunity to watch some administrative frustration, inability and nervousness verging on panic in the past couple of years that has brought me to a realization. Management needs to talk to the humblest of their workforce instead of the upper crust. In the case of the NIH, you need to stop convening preening symposia from the usual suspects, taking the calls of your GlamHound buddies and responding only to reps of learn-ed societies. Walk the earth. Talk to real applicants. Get CSR to identify some of your most frustrated applicants and see what is making them fail. Find out which of the apparently well-funded applicants have to work their tails off to maintain funding. Compare and contrast to prior eras. Ask everyone what it would take to Fix the NIH.
Of course this will make things harder for you in the short term. Everyone perceives the RealProblem as that guy, over there. And the solutions that will FixTheNIH are whatever makes their own situation easier.
But I think you need to hear this. You need to hear the desperation and the desire most of us have simply to do our jobs. You need to hear just how deeply broken the NIH award system is for everyone, not just the ESI and EEI category.
PS. How’s it going solving the problem identified by Ginther? We haven’t seen any data lately but at last check everything was as bad as ever so…
PPS. Are you just not approving comments on your blog? Or is this a third rail issue nobody wants to comment on?
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*I make fun of the “sudden realization” because it took me about 2 h of my very first study section meeting ever to realize that “New Investigator” checkbox applicants from genuine newbies did very poorly and all of these were being scooped up by very well established and accomplished investigators who simply hadn’t been NIH funded. Perhaps they were from foreign institutions, now hired in the US. Or perhaps lived on NSF or CDC or DOD awards. The idea that it took NIH something like 8-10 years to realize this is difficult to stomach.
**The R29 was crippled in terms of budget, btw. and had other interesting features.
***lolsob
****Yep, that would be my demographic.
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