Susan Rice Empowered to Hold NIH Director Collins to Account on the Funding Discrimination
January 20, 2021
On his first day in office President Biden signed an Executive Order described thusly by the NYT. I am having difficulty finding a link to the exact text right now. [Edited to Add: The Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.]
“The president designated Susan E. Rice, who is the head of his Domestic Policy Council, as the leader of a “robust, interagency” effort requiring all federal agencies to make “rooting out systemic racism” central to their work. His order directs the agencies to review and report on equity in their ranks within 200 days, including a plan on how to remove barriers to opportunities in policies and programs. The order also moves to ensure that Americans of all backgrounds have equal access to federal government resources, benefits and services. It starts a data working group as well as the study of new methods to measure and assess federal equity and diversity efforts.”
Well, the NIH doesn’t have to take 200 days to “review and report”. They’ve already done so in
Ginther, D.K., Schaffer, W.T., Schnell, J., Masimore, B., Liu, F., Haak, L.L., Kington, R., 2011. Race, ethnicity, and NIH research awards. Science 333(6045), 1015-1019.
and
Hoppe, T.A., Litovitz, A., Willis, K.A., Meseroll, R.A., Perkins, M.J., Hutchins, B.I., Davis, A.F., Lauer, M.S., Valantine, H.A., Anderson, J.M., Santangelo, G.M., 2019. Topic choice contributes to the lower rate of NIH awards to African-American/black scientists. Sci Adv 5(10), eaaw7238.
So we can skip the 200 days worth of can kicking, Dr. Collins, and move straight to the fixing part. The “ensure” part. The “equal access” part.
This means funding research on topics that are important to Americans of all backgrounds, including African-American ones. Equally. This means pumping up the budget of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). It also means holding the other ICs responsible for taking on their share of these projects and not just shrugging them off into NIMHD.
It means funding not just white American science teams that work on these topics but funding teams of African-American investigators. Equally.
It also means not just funding African-American professors to work on topics of relevance to the health interests of African-Americans but rather equalizing the funding chances of African-American PIs who choose to work on any topic at all.
It’s time to go big. Forces within the NIH who have been trying to do good on this should feel empowered to shout down the nay sayers and to hold the foot draggers to account.
Forces outside the NIH who have been trying to do good on this should likewise feel empowered to hold Susan Rice, their Senators and Congress Reps to account.
NIH grant application topics by IC
August 13, 2020
As you will recall, the Hoppe et al. 2019 report [blogpost] both replicated Ginther et al 2011 with a subsequent slice of grant applications, demonstrating that after the news of Ginther, with a change in scoring procedures and changes in permissible revisions, applications with Black PIs still suffered a huge funding disparity. Applications with white PIs are 1.7 times more likely to be funded. Hoppe et al also identified a new culprit for the funding disparity to applications with African-American / Black PIs. TOPIC! “Aha”, they crowed, “it isn’t that applications with Black PIs are discriminated against on that basis, no. It’s that the applications with Black PIs just so happen to be disproportionately focused on topics that just so happen to have lower funding / success rates”. Of course it also was admitted very quietly by Hoppe et al that:
WH applicants also experienced lower award rates in these clusters, but the disparate outcomes between AA/B and WH applicants remained, regardless of whether the topic was among the higher- or lower-success clusters (fig. S6).
Hoppe et al., Science Advances, 2019 Oct 9;5(10):eaaw7238. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw7238
If you go to the Supplement Figure S6 you can see that for each of the five quintiles of topic clusters (ranked by award rates) applications with Black PIs fare worse than applications with white PIs. In fact, in the least-awarded quintile, which has the highest proportion of the applications with Black PIs, the white PI apps enjoy a 1.87 fold advantage, higher than the overall mean of the 1.65 fold advantage.
Record scratch: As usual I find something new every time I go back to one of these reports on the NIH funding disparity. The overall award rate disparity was 10.7% for applications with Black PIs versus 17.7% for those with white PIs. The take away from Hoppe et al. 2019 is reflected in the left side of Figure S6 where it shows that the percentage of applications with Black PIs is lowest (<10%) in the topic domains with the highest award rates and highest (~28%) in the domains with the lowest award rates. The percentages are more similar for apps with white PIs, approximately 20% per quintile. But the right side lists the award rates by quintile. And here we see that in the second highest award-rate topic quintile, the disparity is similar to the mean (12.6% vs 18.9%) but in the top quintile it is greater (13.4% vs 24.2% or a 10.8%age point gap vs the 7%age point gap overall). So if Black PIs followed Director Collins’ suggestion that they work on the right topics with the right methodologies, they would fare even worse due to the 1.81 fold advantage for applications with white PIs in the top most-awarded topic quintile!
Okay but what I really started out to discuss today was a new tiny tidbit provided by a blog post on the Open Mike blog. It reports the topic clusters by IC. This is cool to see since the word clusters presented in Hoppe (Figure 4) don’t map cleanly onto any sort of IC assumptions.
All we are really concerned with here is the ranking along the X axis. From the blog post:
…17 topics (out of 148), representing 40,307 R01 applications, accounted for 50% of the submissions from African American and Black (AAB) PIs. We refer to these topics as “AAB disproportionate” as these are topics to which AAB PIs disproportionately apply.
Note the extreme outliers. One (MD) is the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. I mean… seriously. The other (NR) is the National Institute on Nursing Research which is also really interesting. Did I mention that these two Is get 0.8% and 0.4% of the NIH budget, respectively? The NIH mission statement reads: “NIH’s mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” Emphasis added. The next one (TW) is the Fogerty International Center which focuses on global health issues (hello global pandemics!) and gets 0.2% of the NIH budget.
Then we get into the real meat. At numbers 4-6 on the AAB Disproportionate list of ICs we reach the National Institute on Child Health and Development (HD, 3.7% of the budget), NIDA (DA, 3.5%) and NIAAA (AA, 1.3%). And clocking in at 7 and 9 we have National Institute on Aging (AG, 8.5%) and the NIMH (MH, 4.9%).
These are a lot of NIH dollars being expended in ICs of central interest to me and a lot of my audience. We could have made some guesses based on the word clusters in Hoppe et al 2019 but this gets us closer.
Yes, we now need to get deeper and more specific. What is the award disparity for applications with Black vs white PIs within each of these ICs? How much of that disparity, if it exists, accounted for by the topic choices within IC?
And lets consider the upside. If, by some miracle, a given IC is doing particularly well with respect to funding applications with Black PIs fairly….how are they accomplishing this variance from the NIH average? What can the NIH adopt from such an IC to improve things?
Oh, and NINR and NIMHHD really need a boost to their budgets. Maybe NIH Director Collins could put a 10% cut prior to award to the other ICs to improve investment in the applying-knowledge-to-enhance-health goals of the mission statement?
It is that time of year when NIH issues a notice covering some long-standing prohibitions against spending their grant money on certain topics. NOT-OD-20-066 reads in part:
(a) No part of any appropriation contained in this Act or transferred pursuant to section 4002 of Public Law 111– 148 shall be used, other than for normal and recognized executive legislative relationships, for publicity or propaganda purposes, for the preparation, distribution, or use of any kit, pamphlet, booklet, publication, electronic communication, radio, television, or video presentation designed to support or defeat the enactment of legislation before the Congress or any State or local legislature or legislative body, except in presentation to the Congress or any State or local legislature itself, or designed to support or defeat any proposed or pending regulation, administrative action, or order issued by the executive branch of any State or local government, except in presentation to the executive branch of any State or local government itself.
(b) No part of any appropriation contained in this Act or transferred pursuant to section 4002 of Public Law 111–148 shall be used to pay the salary or expenses of any grant or contract recipient, or agent acting for such recipient, related to any activity designed to influence the enactment of legislation, appropriations, regulation, administrative action, or Executive order proposed or pending before the Congress or any State government, State legislature or local legislature or legislative body, other than for normal and recognized executive-legislative relationships or participation by an agency or officer of a State, local or tribal government in policy making and administrative processes within the executive branch of that government
You can see the weasel words, of course. The deployment of “designed to” could mean a whole host of things when it comes to “publication” or “electronic communication”. But still, the message one tends to receive here is that if some Congress Critter gets all up in a snit about it, you could be in trouble for publishing any studies or reviews or opinion pieces that tend to have political/public policy implications.
Gotta be honest folks, I think the vast majority of what I do could possible have public policy implications. Now, of course, most of what I do falls on the seemingly good side of one of the specific issues of concern to Congress about what I publish.
None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for any activity that promotes the legalization of any drug or other substance included in schedule I of the schedules of controlled substances established under section 202 of the Controlled Substances Act except for normal and recognized executive congressional communications.
But you can see where someone might get nervous about whether or not some aspect of their study of, oh, cannabis or THC or cannabidiol (CBD) just picking one out of the hat not really, might be viewed as “promoting legalization”. Especially if some advocates happened upon some result or other and started using your paper as their Exhibit A…. You can also see where the cannabis proponents (especially the medical advocates) might view this as the root of the conspiracy to scientifically demonize their favorite plant. and maybe it is, maybe it is… Congress will argue that they’ve thought this all through!
(b) The limitation in subsection (a) shall not apply when there is significant medical evidence of a therapeutic advantage to the use of such drug or other substance or that federally sponsored clinical trials are being conducted to determine therapeutic advantage. “
…..but this doesn’t help, right? The whole point of doing basic and pre-clinical and even clinical research (not trials, research) is to determine if there even IS any ” significant medical evidence of a therapeutic advantage“, right? This escape clause reads like you have to pull that medical evidence out of a non-Federally-funded hat before you can then do more research which might tend to “promote the legalization” of, e.g., cannabis.
But I digress. Oh, look SQUIRREL!
(2) Gun Control (Section 210)
“None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.”
Yeah, that’s still in there. Notwithstanding Republican protestations that there really isn’t a ban on research on gun-related harms every time they get put in the crosshairs (oops) by the press in the wake of a mass shooting.
But I digress. Again. The thing I really wanted to discuss is:
(3) Anti-Lobbying (Section 503)
“ (a) No part of any appropriation contained in this Act or transferred pursuant to section 4002 of Public Law 111– 148 shall be used, other than for normal and recognized executive legislative relationships, for publicity or propaganda purposes, for the preparation, distribution, or use of any kit, pamphlet, booklet, publication, electronic communication, radio, television, or video presentation designed to support or defeat the enactment of legislation before the Congress or any State or local legislature or legislative body,
….
(c) The prohibitions in subsections (a) and (b) shall include any activity to advocate or promote any proposed, pending or future Federal, State or local tax increase, or any proposed, pending, or future requirement or restriction on any legal consumer product, including its sale or marketing, including but not limited to the advocacy or promotion of gun control.”
“any legal consumer product”. WOWIEE. Yes guns, but at present this includes all kinds of barely-regulated supplements and quack remedies (hi CBD!), cigarettes, e-cigarettes, organic and GMO/antiGMO foodstuffs…. the list goes on and on. And I don’t know how “services” might be distinguished from “product” but this might include chiropracty and aromatherapy and meditation and hot yoga and who knows what else that falls into the probably-woo camp.
Maybe this was always in this anti-lobbying section and I just never noticed or realized the full implications, as written.
My concern is not really that the NIH will come after my or my institution for a refund should any Congress Critter decide to make hay against one of my papers under this prohibition.
It’s that NIH ICs will run scared before this and be highly conservative in terms of what they fund, lest it run afoul of Congress.
Yeah, I had a ring side seat at one of these in the past so it’s not a theoretical concern. It’s something that should concern all of us.
The NIH Director Talked to Congress About Scientific Inspiration
August 23, 2018
The Director of the NIH went to testify before Congress today and one of the tweets from the @NIH account summarized a point he was making thusly:
In case there is any trouble with the auto post of the tweet, it reads in part:
And, now, on to my favorite: Scientific Inspiration. I can assure you that researchers funded by #NIH come to work every day full of innovative ideas and the wherewithal to see those ideas through.
It is, of course, very likely true that on any given day of the year there are at least two researchers (he did use the plural) who come to work full of innovative ideas and the wherewithal to see those idea through. Given the size and scope of the NIH funding mission (let us assume he meant extramural, not just intramural, funding) this is statistically obvious.
What is not true, however, is the broader implication that all or even most researchers who are funded by NIH extramural grants have the wherewithal to see their many innovative ideas through. If this is what he conveyed, intentional or not, he misled Congress. I was going to say “lied to” but I really have no idea whether Francis Collins legitimately believes this false notion to be true or not.
The @NIH twitter also pointed out that Director Collins bragged how they were focusing on, and increasing, the number of funded young investigators:
In an environment where the NIH budget has been essentially flatlined since 2004 (with a resulting decrement in purchasing power, due to inflation) you cannot increase the number of funded investigators without decreasing the amount of grant funding each of the investigators enjoys, on average. As we know, the purchasing power of the full modular R01 (the workhorse award) has declined substantially, it is now something like 61% of what it was in 2000.
Ever increasing numbers of applications resulted in decreasing per-application success rates all through the 2000s. Data from the NIH website show that success rates of under 20% have been the reality for the past 7 years.
At last report from the NIH, most investigators held one or two major awards from the NIH at any one time. The reality of poor success rates has meant that maintaining consistent funding with one or two awards across time is very uncertain. Even the ability to competitively continue an existing award given reasonable progress has essentially disappeared. PIs have to put in competing continuations early and many of us realize that we have to have overlapping “new” awards on the same topic in order to have any decent chance of continuity of a research program.
The loss of funding can have dire consequences. It means technicians, students or postdocs may have to be let go. New staff cannot be brought on board until funding is re-acquired. There will be a significant delay until postdocs and graduate students can be recruited (up to 12 months is not unusual). And as Datahound analyzed, the cumulative probability of a lab regaining funding after a gap was 20% within 2 years (in 2012) and reached an asymptote of about 40% within 5-6 years in prior Fiscal Year data.
I have been around approximately continuously NIH grant funded PIs for about two decades now. I have engaged similar folks in online discussion for over a decade, broadening my experiences beyond my department and subfield.
It is simply not true that the majority of NIH funded scientists enjoy some sort of halcyon period where we all “come to work full of innovative ideas and the wherewithal to see those idea through”. Most of the time, we come to work fearful that we cannot maintain the wherewithal to keep the laboratory functioning in a minimally healthy way with reasonably good expectations for a continuously funded future for the duration of our careers. And we spend too much time strategizing about how to maintain the wherewithal.
Admittedly, it isn’t all terrible all the time. I would estimate something on the order of 20-25%ish of my time as a grant funded PI has indeed been great. I have had extended intervals of time in which I did have the wherewithal to come to work focused only on the scientific ideas I wanted to pursue. It is AWESOME to have these intervals. Really. I totally get it. I appreciate it. I love(d) these times.
But it is not the constant reality of the vast majority of NIH funded PIs that I talk to. It has not been my consistent reality.
The fact that the very head of the NIH does not seem to understand this is dismaying. It means that nothing will change. And, in fact, given his glee at creating yet more mouths at the trough this aspect of NIH funded science will continue to get worse under his Directorship.
NSF negotiates with terrorists
March 18, 2016
This is funny.
Right wing anti-science nuts in Congress are not going to stop attacking research grants just because the Abstracts are expressed in less technical language. Their political agenda is at work and poor understanding of the project has nothing whatever to do with their motivations.
Congress is dissatisfied with NIH’s spending priorities!
October 21, 2014
This passage appeared in a highly prestigious journal of science.
“Important elements in both Senate and the House are showing increasing dissatisfaction over Congress’s decade-long honeymoon with medical research….critics are dissatisfied…with the NIH’s procedures for supervising the use of money by its research grantees….NIH officials..argued, rather, that the most productive method in financing research is to pick good people with good projects and let them carry out their work without encumbering them…its growth has been phenomenal….[NIH director}: nor do we believe that most scientific groups in the country have an asking and a selling price for their product which is research activity…we get a realistic appraisal of what they need to do the job..the supervisory function properly belongs to the universities and other institutions where the research takes place….closing remarks of the report are:…Congress has been overzealous in appropriating money for health research”.
We recently discussed how the Origami Condom project supported under the Small Business Innovation Research Congressional mandate had quite obvious public health implications in a prior post. This was in response to the gleeful Republican bashing of NIH funding priorities in the wake of NIH Director Francis Collins’ rather poorly considered claims* that Ebola research has been held back by the flatlining of the NIH budget over the past ten years.
Today we take on another one of these claims that the NIH has not been using its appropriations wisely. Fox news provides a handy example of the claim:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians
As the wags are posting on various social media outlets, more Americans have been dumped by [insert popular entertainment personality] than have been killed by Ebola.
In striking contrast, obesity is a big killer of Americans. According to one review of the evidence:
Using data on all eligible subjects from all six studies, Allison et al. estimated that 280,184 obesity-attributable deaths occurred in the U.S. annually. When risk ratios calculated for nonsmokers and never-smokers were applied to the entire population (assuming these ratios to produce the best estimate for all subjects, regardless of smoking status, i.e., that obesity would exert the same deleterious effects across all smoking categories), the mean estimate for deaths due to obesity was 324,940.
Additional analyses were performed controlling for prevalent chronic disease at baseline using data from the CPS1 and NHS. After controlling for preexisting disease, the mean annual number of obesity-attributable deaths was estimated to be 374,239 (330,324 based on CPS1 data and 418,154 based on NHS data).
Over 350,000 Americans die annually of obesity. For the Republican Congresspersons in the audience, “annually” means every year. Last year, this year, next year. Over 350,000.
No biggie, right?
Whoops, maybe it is worse than we thought?
Researchers found that obesity accounted for nearly 20 percent of deaths among white and black Americans between the ages of 40 and 85. Previously, many scientists estimated that about 5 percent of deaths could be attributed to obesity.
And is coming close to beating smoking as the top preventable killer of American citizens?
Flegel et al 2004 and Flegel et al 2013 provide some handy context to estimating mortality causes for the nerdier types. From the 2013 meta-analysis:
[overweight (BMI of 25-<30), obesity (BMI of ≥30), grade 1 obesity (BMI of 30-<35), and grades 2 and 3 obesity (BMI of ≥35) ] ..
CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Relative to normal weight, both obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.
So. Just this easily we can confirm that obesity is a major public health concern from mortality alone. This doesn’t even get into non-mortal effect of obesity on personal well-being. Major public health concerns are the very province of NIH-funded academic research.
So once again, the applicability of grants that are targeted at reducing obesity (even if it is just understanding the causes of obesity) to the goals of the NIH, as mandated by Congress, is not in question. At all. This is not a frivolous expenditure.
That leaves us with the specific projects in question. I trotted over to RePORTER and pulled up 6 current awards- two are K-mechanism mentored training awards so we’ll focus on the R-mechanism research projects.
R01 HD066963: SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND OBESITY: TEST OF A GENDERED BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL
nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians overweight or obese, compared to half of heterosexual women. In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males. Despite clear evidence from descriptive epidemiologic research that sexual orientation and gender markedly pattern obesity disparities, there is almost no prospective, analytic epidemiologic research into the causes of these disparities. It will be impossible to develop evidence-based preventive interventions unless we first answer basic questions about causal pathways, as we plan to do.
I bolded a key part, from my perspective. You waste a ton of money, often public money, if you go off with solutions to problems without having a clear understanding of the things causing or following from this problem. Epidemiological and sociological research guides not just public policy but also additional studies of physiology, genetic liabilities, etc. So this specific project would seem to be of considerable use.
R01 DK099360:TYPE 2 DIABETES AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION DISPARITIES IN WOMEN
lesbian and bisexual (LB) women may be at elevated risk for developing T2D because they are more likely than heterosexual women to experience obesity and other risk factors linked with T2D such as cigarette smoking, violence victimization, and depressive distress. Nonetheless, knowledge of T2D and how it may disproportionately affect LB women is severely limited. Studies using longitudinal designs that have comprehensively examined how lifestyle, diet, and psychosocial risk factors for T2D may differ between LB and heterosexual women across the life course are virtually nonexistent.
This project emphasizes non-mortal morbidity, i.e., Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). And again, the abstract describes how we know almost nothing about the reasons for the obesity disparity between lesbian and heterosexual women. If we are going to disentangle potential social, behavioral, cultural, physiological and genetic contributors to the disparity, we need information. And very likely, through this research we will come to know more about how these variables affect obesity risk for all Americans, across all subpopulations. This will help us design better interventions to reduce the obesity burden. Clearly this is another grant that is clearly non-frivolous and fits into the public health mandate of the NIH.
R21 HD073120: UNDERSTANDING DISPARITIES IN OBESITY AND WEIGHT BEHAVIORS BY SEXUAL IDENTITY
Previous research indicates that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) adults experience more adverse health outcomes than their peers. Findings from the few studies examining weight disparities among adults suggest that lesbian women are more likely to be overweight or obese compared to their heterosexual peers, though less is known about gay men and bisexuals. Given the scant research to date in this area, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recently issued a call for additional research on LGBT health. Furthermore, IOM highlighted the need to utilize a life-course framework when examining health disparities by sexual identity, acknowledging the unique influence of various life stages on health
What’s this now? Even the US Institute of Medicine has reported on how important it is to combat obesity in US citizens? I mean dang, guys, it’s the IOM.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) is an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public.
Established in 1970, the IOM is the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which was chartered under President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Nearly 150 years later, the National Academy of Sciences has expanded into what is collectively known as the National Academies, which comprises the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Research Council, and the IOM.
And they do investigations, review evidence, compare the facts…
anyway, this R21 is going to focus on young adults and do studies under the following Aims:
(1) Quantify disparities in obesity, dietary intake, physical activity, unhealthy weight control behavior, body satisfaction and other weight-related health outcomes among LGB and heterosexual students; (2) Identify major weight-related health behavioral patterns, or profiles, and the extent to which these behavioral profiles differ by sexual identity and gender; and (3) Characterize these behavioral profiles by demographic factors and health outcomes (e.g., age, socioeconomic status, health care coverage, obesity, and health status). We hypothesize that LGB students engage in more adverse behaviors than their heterosexual peers and exhibit differential behavioral patterning.
Yep, more psycho-social research but I continue to assert that without this evidence, we run the risk of wasting more money pursuing directions that could have been falsified by the epidemiological and social science studies of this type.
The final research project is an R15/AREA grant:
R15 AA020424: MINORITY STRESS, ALCOHOL USE, AND INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE AMONG LESBIANS
Ok, going by the Abstract this one is indeed focused on Alcohol abuse and intimate partner violence and I don’t see why it is being triggered by the obesity keyword on the search. But still, I think we can see that this one ALSO would draw right wing fire. Even though, once again, alcoholism and intimate partner violence are huge health issues in the US.
As with the Origami Condom NIH Grant, we can find with relatively little thinking that the “National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians” comment is wrongly placed in an article addressing “wasteful” spending on the part of the NIH. These projects address the causes of obesity, which is basically a top predator of Americans at the moment. Obesity causes excess mortality and morbidity, which is of course associated with financial costs. Costs to the individual and costs to us all as a society that shares some degree of social support for the health care of our fellow citizens. It is in our direct and obvious interests to conduct research that will help us reduce this burden of obesity. As far as studying subpopulations who appear to be at increased risk for obesity goes, there is no reason not to want to help African-Americans, Southern Americans, Flyoverlandia Americans or…Lesbian-Americans. Right? And while it may take a little bit of a leap of faith for those who haven’t thought hard about it, understanding the causes of a major health condition in those other people over there helps to understand the causes in people who are just like ourselves. By subtraction if by no other means.
For my regular Readers I’ll close with a plea. Use analysis like this one to beat back this stupid meme that is going around about “frivolous” NIH expenditures. This is not just about this current Ebola fervor. This is about the normal operations of the NIH as it has progressed over decades. There are always those wanting to score cheap political points by bashing science as trivial or obviously ridiculous. Nine times out of ten, these charges are easily rebutted. So take the time to do so, even if it just posting some text pulled from the grant abstract and a link to a morbidity report on whichever health concern happens to be under discussion.
__
*”poorly considered” meaning he didn’t apparently anticipate handing such a bunch of base-bait to the Republicans.
The Origami Condom and NIH Ebola funding
October 16, 2014
One of the NIH funded research projects that has been bandied about with much glee from the right wing, in the wake of Francis Collins’ unfortunate assertion about Ebola research and the flatlined NIH budget, is the “Origami Condom”. It shows why NIH Director Collins should have known better. The Origami Condom sounds trivial and ridiculous, right? “Origami”. hahah. Oooh, “condom”. Wait, what are we, 12 year olds?
Rand Paul provides a convenient example.
Read the rest of this entry »
In an Op-Ed in the NYT, Representative Andy Harris (R, Maryland) lays out three main issues that he would like to address regarding the functions of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Harris [Wikipedia] was a Physician Scientist prior to running for Congress and was the PI of NIH Grant R01 GM036044-04. This grant ran from 1986-2007 and was competitively renewed three times. This, in my mind, gives us much more reason, than is usual for a Congress Critter, to hear the man out.
The Op-Ed proposes to alter the infamous age-of-first-R01 award. Even the NIH [see post at RockTalking] itself agrees that the age of 42 might be too old. Consequently, when Harris recommends:
Congress should also mandate that the median age of first research awards to new investigators be under 40 within five years, and under 38 within 10 years. Failure to meet these benchmarks would result in penalties for the N.I.H., including possible funding cuts.
I am in full agreement. I might even want more aggressive benchmarks. Telling NIH that they must address this is fine because pretty much all stakeholders have been agreeing this is ridiculous. There is very little that I have heard in the way of any serious argument that this increasing age of first-R01 award is a good thing. Now….what I really want to see is the inter-quartile range. What we see is the median and it simply doesn’t square with my seat of the pants estimate. It looks really old to me, meaning I know a lot of people that got their start in their early to mid thirties (yes, within the last 15 years, thanks) and very few that got their first R01 at 43 or older. It may be the case that the distribution is nearly Gaussian….or it could be really skewed. It would not surprise me in the least if the 25th percentile is age 36 and the 75th percentile is age 45, for example. I want to see the entire distribution, ideally, but the inter-quartile range would be a good substitute.
The next item is standard right winger, Republican fare when it comes to federally funded science and I oppose it. Strongly. Rep Harris’ version:
To make sure it meets those goals, we should insist on the development of an N.I.H.-wide strategic plan — not just for targeting younger researchers, but for prioritizing different avenues of research overall. Today we see too many grants going to things like creating a video game for moms to teach them how to get their kids to eat more vegetables, or studying the creation of a social security system in southern Mexico. Such projects may have value to some, but is creating a video game really more important than researching a cure for Alzheimer’s?
It is easy for anyone to point to some “ridiculous” grant award or study topic that revs up their base. Whether you are opposed to research into topics that are “solved” in the Republican mind with prohibition and moral tut-tutting (HIV/AIDS, drug abuse), in the Democratic mind with hippie veganism and anticorporatism (diabetes, heart diseasee) or in the waccaloon mind by denial (ban all animal research, for example) isn’t really important. I can show you how stupidly irrelevant some basic research is, Sarah Palin can dismiss drosophila models or PP and St. McKnight can insist that only “vertically ascending science” is relevant to real advance. We’re all wrong. The tremendous strength and success of the NIH-funded research enterprise relies intimately on the relative absence of top-down control. Investigator initiated science is the best way, of a myriad of options. Period. When we try to be “efficient” by picking winners in advance, we hinder scientific advance. It is really surprising Dr. Harris doesn’t realize this, even if Representative Harris feels compelled to advance the standard right wing attack against science that discomforts their constituencies of Big Business and Social Conservative Theocrats.
The final agenda item of Rep Harris is, I believe, the true agenda. The bone thrown to young investigators is only a sweetener, I would bet. He wants to end the “tap”.
For one thing, we need to eliminate a budget gimmick, known as the “tap,” that allows the Department of Health and Human Services to shift money out of the N.I.H. budget into other department efforts. The N.I.H. lost $700 million to the “tap” in 2013 alone. Instead, the money should be placed under the control of the N.I.H. director, with an explicit instruction that it go to young investigators as a supplement to money already being spent. If we don’t force the N.I.H. to spend it on young investigators, history has shown that the agency won’t.
And what is this, you ask? Datahound to the rescue:
DJMH: The HHS Secretary has the authority to transfer funds for Program Evaluation. This has been down routinely for more than a decade to fund AHRQ and other agencies and to support program evaluation at NIH.
See http://www.nih.gov/about/director/crsrept.pdf
The NIH and other Public Health Service agencies within HHS are subject to
a budget “tap” called the PHS Program Evaluation Transfer, authorized by section
241 of the PHS Act (42 U.S.C. § 238j). It is used to fund not only program
evaluation activities, but also functions that are seen as having benefits across the
Public Health Service, such as the National Center for Health Statistics in CDC and
the entire budget of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. These and
other uses of the evaluation tap by the appropriators have the effect of redistributing
appropriated funds among PHS agencies. The FY2005 and FY2006 L-HHS-ED
appropriations set the tap at 2.4%, as does the FY2007 Senate bill. The House bill
returns the maximum tap to 1.0%, the level specified in the PHS Act. Since NIH has
the largest budget among the PHS agencies, it becomes the largest “donor” of
program evaluation funds and is a relatively minor recipient.
Okay….you think to yourself, why would a Republican Congressman be so het up over this? Well, if you do some judicious googling about AHRQ you find things like this.
The U.S. House Committee on Appropriations released their draft 2013 Labor, Health and Human Services funding bill. In their summary, the number one stated intent is the following:
“Defunding ObamaCare – The legislation contains several provisions to stop the implementation of ObamaCare…One extreme cut that was thrown in the draft was not just defunding, but total termination of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a tiny agency under the Department of Health and Human Services. AHRQ has a budget of $405 million.
That looks to be more than half of the “tap” that Rep Harris wants to close. And this brings us to wonder if Dr. / Rep Harris has any opinions on the ACA?
Looks as though he is not a fan. Nope, not a fan. At all.
So, Dear Reader, I confess I come away from Rep Harris’ Op-Ed with a feeling that the true agenda here is a very familiar right-wing Republican one that goes after part of the Affordable Care Act and attempts to gain additional direct say over what grants the NIH funds. The part about supporting younger scientists is merely a convenient ploy to sweeten the deal and attract the unwary. I don’t believe it is the true purpose here.
Congress is losing it.
February 27, 2014
Just after we noticed that Congress has seen fit to add a special prohibition on anything done with Federal grant funds that might suggest gun control is in order, there’s another late breaking Congressional mandate notice.
FY 2014 New Legislative Mandate
Restriction of Pornography on Computer Networks (Section 528)
“(a) None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to maintain or establish a computer network unless such network blocks the viewing, downloading, and exchanging of pornography.(b) Nothing in subsection (a) shall limit the use of funds necessary for any Federal, State, tribal, or local law enforcement agency or any other entity carrying out criminal investigations, prosecution, or adjudication activities.”
Really guys? That was a top priority item?
Interesting though, isn’t it? Including indirect cost expenditures this would seem to apply to a very large number of Universities in the US. And now Congress has demanded they adopt nanny pR0n filters.
I don’t see any exceptions for classwork here, either.
Further News on the Volunteer Postdoc Advertisement
October 25, 2013
I had previously noted a situation in which an ad for a volunteer (i.e., unpaid) postdoc position requiring 2-3 years of prior experience was posted in the San Diego area.
A bit by David Wagner (@david_r_wagner) on the KPBS site specifies:
Well, it wasn’t a joke. But it wasn’t exactly straight-forward, either.
The job listing was vague from the get-go. Who exactly was hiring? The only details given were “lab in La Jolla.”
Well, there are lots of labs in La Jolla. So I had to do some digging to find out which one posted this, and I found out that the listing was posted by a researcher named Laura Crotty Alexander. She’s a physician at the VA San Diego Healthcare System who doubles as a UCSD faculty member. I couldn’t reach her for comment.
If Alexander’s listing looked like a terrible opportunity, that’s by design, according to VA chief of staff Robert Smith.
“Frankly, what she was trying to do was make it look unappealing,” Smith said. “Because she was trying to create an advertisement that nobody would apply to.”
You see, the VA lab already had someone in mind for the position: a postdoc from Egypt who actually volunteered to work for free.
The reporter further specified:
which in my view is a far from uncommon situation. I’ve received inquiries about working in my lab under similar circumstances.
This is wrong.
You know how I feel about unpaid internships.
Unpaid internships are a systemic labor exploitation scam- yes, in science labs too.
That was written in the context of undergraduate “interns”. Imagine the magnitude of my distaste for exploiting a PhD with 2-3 years of postdoctoral experience. It is wrong.
1) It is wrong because it is labor exploitation. We dealt with that over 100 years ago in the US. Yes, exploitation always continues and is resisted in fits and starts by unions, regulation and competitive pressures. But the arguments remain the same, the benefits of exploiting labor are tempting and the excuses are no better in the scientific context. I don’t care that the candidate “volunteers”. I don’t care that the candidate is getting authorship or keeping her hand in the game of science or whatever excuse you want to advance. This is the case for all postdocs. Should we refuse to pay all of them? Heck no. Just like we stopped letting companies demand their employees worked in the mines for 14 hr shifts, 7 days a week with no breaks. Just like we discouraged and restricted company-store, company-town scams which ended up reducing real wages. Just like we established a minimum wage. Etc. Just like modern jurisprudence is rejecting free intern scams.
2) It is wrong because it is an unfair competitive advantage for those who choose to exploit junior scientists in this way. I am a PI who is competing for precious research grant funds with other PIs. This competition is based in large part on the work product that comes out of our respective laboratories. Data generated and papers published. If some other person gets labor for free and I have to pay for it, then I am disadvantaged. Under our general labor laws, this is an unfair tilt to the table. Everyone should have to play by the same rules.
Please, people. Call your Congress Critter. Draw their attention to this news report. Use your knowledge of their political positions to trip their triggers. Maybe it is the visa-dodging aspect. Maybe it is the “taking the job from American postdocs” aspect. Maybe they are sensitive to labor exploitation arguments. Whichever works, use it.
h/t: @neuromusic
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Addditional:
Tightly wound
April 17, 2013
A friend was recently observing that we academics seem pretty high strung right now. Cranked up to the breaking point, I’d say.
Of course we are. This sequester and continuing resolution thing has really put the bite on. The lab closings that seemed only in the realm of a Friend of a Friend or a likely possibility are now becoming reality. I’m seeing PIs leave. Close down. Jump ship. In all of this there are technicians and postdocs losing their jobs. Grad students who cannot find a funded lab to join after the rotations are finished up. Institutional decision making that seems even closer than usual to hand-flapping panic rather than a plan.
Baby, it’s cold outside.
The NIH budget never actually doubled
February 4, 2013
I pointed out some time ago that inflation “UnDoubled” the NIH budget rapidly in the wake of sustained Bush-era (now Obama-era) flatline budgets for the NIH. Nothing like a graph to make a point so I’ll repost it.
Figure 1. NIH Appropriations (Adjusted for Inflation in Biomedical Research) from 1965 through 2007, the President’s Request for 2008, and Projected Historical Trends through 2010.
All values have been adjusted according to the Biomedical Research and Development Price Index on the basis of a standard set of relevant goods and services (with 1998 as the base year).* The trend line indicates average real annual growth between fiscal years 1971 and 1998 (3.34%), with projected growth (dashed line) at the same rate. The red square indicates the president’s proposed NIH budget for fiscal year 2008, also adjusted for inflation in biomedical research.
Now, what I ran across today at Ethan Perlstein’s post on Postdocalypse now (go read) was this graph which makes the same point in a slightly different way. I like it. He didn’t link the source so I’m not certain of the inflation adjustment used…probably not the above BRDPI, I would think. But still…makes the point doesn’t it? At best the NIH purchasing power went up by 50%. It was never actually “doubled”.
UPDATE: Perlstein noted that he grabbed the figure from this article at dailykos by emptypockets which says this about the sourcing:
The Science column links to a study by Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University (PDF of PowerPoint slides) that puts some numbers on exactly how the doubling affected young scientists.
And help keep his attention on this possible throw-away from the State of the Union address.
I was heartened by several observations from the US President that seemed to suggest he understands that investment in basic research (no, not just targeted development) was the key to sustained economic growth into the future. But you need to help keep him on task. And get Congress on board.
I noted a few months ago that a Change.org petition has been launched to collect signatures favoring minor increases in funding for the NIH. There are 3,931 people as of this writing.
Are you one of them? Have you passed the link around your lab, department or Uni? How about to your academic socities? Have you posted it on your Facebook and Twitter feeds?
Please do.
Petition your Congress Critter
November 11, 2011
I ran across a Change.org petition on the Twitts today that asks Congress to support scientific research in the current budget discussions. This one is focused on the NIH:
Congress: increase federal research funding for the National Institutes of Health
The text reads, in part:
Dear Members of Congress
I am writing to you today to implore you to support the House proposal to increase the 2012 National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 3.3% ($31.7 billion). Since the 1930’s, the NIH has been a fundamental supporter of basic biomedical research in the U.S. Funding from the NIH supports research in all 50 states. These awards are made to over 3,000 universities, medical schools, and research institutions, and they support more than 350,000 researchers. NIH funding to basic research has supported findings that were honored by 121 Nobel Prizes, including this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The nonprofit coalition United for Medical Research concluded that funding by the NIH in 2010 produced $68 billion in new economic activity, which is a greater than 100% return on our investment!
I urge you to add your name to the petition.
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