NIH data on Discussion Rates and Grant Submitting Vigor

The latest blog post over at Open Mike, from the NIH honcho of extramural grant award Mike Lauer, addresses “Discussion Rate”. This is, in his formulation, the percent of applicants (in a given Fiscal Year, FY21 in this case) who are PI on at least one application that reaches discussion. I.e., not triaged. The post presents three Tables, with this Discussion rate (and Funding rate) presented by the Sex of the PI, by race (Asian, Black, White only) or ethnicity (Hispanic or Latino vs non-Hispanic only). The tables further presented these breakdowns by Early Stage Investigator, New Investigator, At Risk and Established. At risk is a category of “researchers that received a prior substantial NIH award but, as best we can tell, will have no funding the following fiscal year if they are not successful in securing a competing award this year.” At this point you may wish to revisit an old blog post by DataHound called “Mind the Gap” which addresses the chances of regaining funding once a PI has lost all NIH grants.

I took the liberty of graphing the By-Race/Ethnicity Discussion rates, because I am a visual thinker.

There seem to be two main things that pop out. First, in the ESI category, the Discussion rate for Black PI apps is a lot lower. Which is interesting. The 60% rate for ESI might be a little odd until you remember that the burden of triage may not fall on ESI applications. At least 50% have to be discussed in each study section, small numbers in study section probably mean that on average it is more than half, and this is NIH wide data for FY 21 (5,410 ESI PIs total). Second, the NI category (New, Not Early on the chart) seems to suffer relative to the other categories.

Then I thought a bit about this per-PI Discussion rate being north of 50% for most categories. And that seemed odd to me. Then I looked at another critical column on the tables in the blog post.

The Median number of applications per applicant was…. 1. That means the mode is 1.

Wow. Just….wow.

I can maybe understand this for ESI applicants, since for many of them this will be their first grant ever submitted.

but for “At Risk”? An investigator who has experience as a PI with NIH funding, is about to have no NIH funding if a grant does not hit, and they are submitting ONE grant application per fiscal year?

I am intensely curious how this stat breaks down by deciles. How many at risk PIs are submitting only one grant proposal? Is it only about half? Two-thirds? More?

As you know, my perspective on the NIH grant getting system is that if you have only put in one grant you are not really trying. The associated implication is that any solutions to the various problems that the NIH grant award system might have that are based on someone not getting their grant after only one try are not likely to be that useful.

I just cannot make this make sense to me. Particularly if the NIH

It is slightly concerning that the NIH is now reporting on this category of investigator. Don’t get me wrong. I believe this NIH system should support a greater expectation of approximately continual funding for investigators who are funded PIs. But it absolutely cannot be 100%. What should it be? I don’t know. It’s debatable. Perhaps more importantly who should be saved? Because after all, what is the purpose of NIH reporting on this category if they do not plan to DO SOMETHING about it? By, presumably, using some sort of exception pay or policy to prevent these at risk PIs from going unfunded.

There was just such a plan bruited about for PIs funded with the ESI designation that were unable to renew or get another grant. They called them Early Established Investigators and described their plans to prioritize these apps in NOT-OD-17-101. This was shelved (NOT-OD-18-214) because “NIH’s strategy for achieving these goals has evolved based on on-going work by an Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) Next Generation Researchers Initiative Working Group and other stakeholder feedback” and yet asserted “NIH..will use an interim strategy to consider “at risk investigators”..in its funding strategies“. In other words, people screamed bloody murder about how it was not fair to only consider “at risk” those who happened demographically to benefit from the ESI policy.

It is unclear how these “consider” decisions have been made in the subsequent interval. In a way, Program has always “considered” at risk investigators, so it is particularly unclear how this language changes anything. In the early days I had been told directly by POs that my pleas for an exception pay were not as important because “we have to take care of our long funded investigators who will otherwise be out of funding”. This sort of thing came up in study section more than once in my hearing, voiced variously as “this is the last chance for this PIs one grant” or even “the PI will be out of funding if…”. As you can imagine, at the time I was new and full of beans and found that objectionable. Now….well, I’d be happy to have those sentiments applied to me.

There is a new version of this “at risk” consideration that is tied to the new PAR-22-181 on promoting diversity. In case you are wondering why this differs from the famously rescinded NINDS NOSI, well, NIH has managed to find themselves a lawyered excuse.

Section 404M of the Public Health Service Act (added by Section 2021 in Title II, Subtitle C, of the 21st Century Cures Act, P.L. 114-255, enacted December 13, 2016), entitled, “Investing in the Next Generation of Researchers,” established the Next Generation Researchers Initiative within the Office of the NIH Director.  This initiative is intended to promote and provide opportunities for new researchers and earlier research independence, and to maintain the careers of at-risk investigators.  In particular, subsection (b) requires the Director to “Develop, modify, or prioritize policies, as needed, within the National Institutes of Health to promote opportunities for new researchers and earlier research independence, such as policies to increase opportunities for new researchers to receive funding, enhance training and mentorship programs for researchers, and enhance workforce diversity;

“enacted December 13, 2016“. So yeah, the NOSI was issued after this and they could very well have used this for cover. The NIH chose not to. Now, the NIH chooses to use this aspect of the appropriations language. And keep in mind that when Congress includes something like this NGRI in the appropriations language, NIH has requested it or accepted it or contributed to exactly how it is construed and written. So this is yet more evidence that their prior stance that the “law” or “Congress” was preventing them from acting to close the Ginther Gap was utter horseshit.

Let’s get back to “at risk” as a more explicitly expressed concern of the NIH. What will these policies mean? Well, we do know that none of this comes with any concrete detail like set aside funds (the PAR is not a PAS) or ESI-style relaxation of paylines. We do know that they do this all the damn time, under the radar. So what gives? Who is being empowered by making this “consideration” of at-risk PI applications more explicit? Who will receive exception pay grants purely because they are at risk? How many? Will it be in accordance with distance from payline? How will these “to enhance diversity” considerations be applied? How will these be balanced against regular old “our long term funded majoritarian investigator is at risk omg” sentiments in the Branches and Divisions?

This is one of the reasons I like the aforementioned Datahound analysis, because at least it gave a baseline of actual data for discussion purposes. A framework a given I or C could follow in starting to make intelligent decisions.

What is the best policy for where, who, what to pick up?

Research colonialism, analyzing an RFA

I recently fielded a question from a more junior scientist about what, I think, has been termed research colonialism with specificity to the NIH funding disparity known as the Ginther Gap. One of the outcomes of the Hoppe et al 2019 paper, and the following Lauer et al 2021, was a call for a hard look at research on the health issues of communities of color. How successful are grant proposals on those topics, which ICs are funding them, what are the success rates and what are the budget levels appropriated to, e.g. the NIMHD. I am very much at sea trying to answer the question I was asked, which boiled down to “Why is it always majoritarian PIs being funded to do research with communities of color?”. I really don’t know how to answer that or how to begin to address it with NIH funding data that has been generated so far. However, something came across my transom recently that is a place to start.

The NIH issued RFA-MD-21-004 Understanding and Addressing the Impact of Structural Racism and Discrimination on Minority Health and Health Disparities last year and the resulting projects should be on the RePORTER books by now. I was cued into this by a tweet from the Constellation Project which is something doing co-author networks. That may be useful for a related issue, that of collaboration and co-work. For now, I’m curious about what types of PIs have been able to secure funding from this mechanism. According to my RePORTER search for the RFA, there are currently 17 grants funded.

Of the funded grants, there are 4 from NIMHD, 4 from NIDA, 2 from NIA, 1 each from NIMH, NIHNDS, NINR, NICHD, NIGMS, NIDCD, and NCCIH. In the RFA, NIMHD promised 6-7 awards, NIDA 2, NIA 6, NIGMS 4-6 so obviously NIDA overshot their mark, but the rest are slacking. One each was promised for NIMH, NINDS, NICHD, NIDCD and NCCIH, so all of these are on track. Perhaps we will see a few more grants get funded by the time the FY elapses on Sept 30.

So who is getting funded under this RFA? Doing a quick google on the PIs, and admittedly making some huge assumptions based on the available pictures, I come up with

PI/Multi-PI Contact: White woman (2 NIA; 1 NCCIH; 3 NIDA; 1 NIDCD; 1 NIGMS; 1 NINDS); Black woman (1 NIDA; 1 NICHD; 1 NIMHD); Asian woman (1 NIMHD; 1 NIMHD; 1 NINR); White man (1 NIMHD; 1 NIMH)

Multi-PI, non-contact: Asian woman (1 NIA, 1 NIDA, 1 NIMHD); Black woman (2 NIDA, 1 NIMHD); White woman (1 NIDCD; 1 NIGMS; 1 NINR) Black man (1 NIGMS; 1 NIMH); White man (2 NIMH)

I would say the place I am most likely to be off in terms of someone who appears to me to be white but identifies as a person of color would be white women. Maybe 2-3 I am unsure of. I didn’t bother to keep track of how many of the non-contact PIs are on the proposals with white Contact PIs versus the other way around but….I can’t recall seeing even one where a non-contact white PI was on a proposal with a contact PI who is Black or Asian. (There was one award with three white men and one Black man as PIs and, well, does anyone get away with a four PI list that includes no woman anymore?) Anyway… make of that what you will.

I suspect that this RFA outcome is probably slightly better than the usual? And that if you looked at NIH’s studies that deal with communities or color and/or their health concerns more generally it would be even more skewed towards white PIs?

Ginther et al 2011 reported 69.9% of apps in their sample had white PIs, 16.2% had Asian PIs and 1.4% had Black PIs. Hoppe et al 2019 reported (Table S1) 1.5% of applications had Black PIs and 65.7% had white PIs in their original sample. So the 11 out of 17 grants having white PIs/Contact MultiPIs matches expected distribution, as does 3 Asian PIs. Black PIs are over represented since 1-2% of 17 is..zero grants funded. So this was not an opportunity that NIH took to redress the Ginther Gap.

But should it be? What should be the identity of PIs funded to work on issues related to “racism and discrimination” as it applies to “minority health and health disparities”? The “best” as determined by a study section of peer scientists, regardless of applicant characteristics? Regardless of the by now very well established bias against applications with Black PIs?

Someone on twitter asked about the panel that reviewed these grants. You can see from the funded grants on RePORTER that the study section reviewing these proposals was ZMD1 KNL (J1). Do a little web searching and you find that the roster for the 11/15/2021-11/17/2021 meeting is available. A three day meeting. That must have been painful. There are four chairs and a huge roster listed. I’m not going to search out all of them to figure out how many were white on the review panel. I will note that three of the four chairs were white and one was Asian (three of four were MDs, one was a PHD). This is a good place for a reminder that Hoppe et al reported 2.4% of reviewers were Black and 77.8% white in the study sections reviewing proposals for funding in FY2011-2015. I would be surprised if this study section was anything other than majority white.

NINDS Issues NOSI Requesting Applications from URM Investigators

Notice NOT-NS-21-049 Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): NIH Research Project Grant (R01) Applications from Individuals from Diverse Backgrounds, Including Under-Represented Minorities was released on May 3, 2021.

The NOSI is the new Program Announcement, for those who haven’t been keeping track. As with the old PA the direct benefit is not obvious. There is no set aside funding or promise to fund any applications at all. In the context of Ginther et al 2011, Hoppe et al 2019, the discussions of 2020 and the overall change in tone from the NIH on diversity matters, it is pretty obvious that this is designed merely to be the excuse. This PA, sorry NOSI, is what will permit Program to pick up grants on the (partial?) basis of the PI’s identity.

What identities? Well the NOSI re-states the categories A, B and C that are familiar from other similar documents.

A. Individuals from racial and ethnic groups that have been shown by the National Science Foundation to be underrepresented in health-related sciences on a national basis…

B. Individuals with disabilities, who are defined as those with a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities

C. Individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, defined as those who meet two or more of the following criteria…

And then there is a statement about gender intersectionality to close out.

GREAT! Right?

Yeah, it is. To the extent this is used to figure out a way to start working the naked, quota based, top down, heavy handed affirmative action that has been benefiting ESI applicants since 2007 on the NIH funding disparity identified in Ginther and Hoppe, this is a win. From the very start of hearing about Ginther I‘ve been talking about exception pay rapid solutions and this only heated up with the disingenuous claim that exception pay was not accelerating the disparity which was made in Hoppe et al. The NOSI allows pickups/exception pay, for sure, under the “special interest” idea. I don’t know if this will end up generating explicit payline benefits on a universal categorical basis as has been done at many ICs for ESI applications. The difference, of course, is that the former is much more variable and subject to biases that are expressed by Program Officers individually and collectively. Explicit rules would be better…..ish. It’s complicated.

In a news piece by Jocelyn Kaiser, the prior NIH Director Elias Zerhouni was quoted saying that study sections responded to his 2006/2007 ESI push by “punishing the young investigators with bad scores”. As I have tried to explain numerous times, phrasing this as a matter of malign intent on the part of study section members is a mistake. While it may be true that many reviewers opposed the idea that ESI applicants should get special breaks, adjusting scores to keep the ESI application at the same chances as before Zerhouni’s policies took effect is just a special case of a more general phenomenon.

NIH grant reviewers have a pronounced tendency to review grant proposals with an eye to “fund it” versus “don’t fund it”. Continual exhortations from SROs that panels do not make funding decisions, that they should review merit on a mostly continuous scale and that they should spread scores has minimal impact on this. Reviewers have a general idea of what scores will result in funding and what will not and they score accordingly*. I have mentioned that when I first started on study section the SRO would actually send us score distributions as part of the effort to get us to spread scores. INVEVITABLY the scores would stack up around the perceived funding line. Across a couple of years one could even see this move in tandem (with a round or two lag, obv) with what was funding at the 2-3 ICs that most grants were assigned to.

One interpretation of the “punishing” phenomenon is simply that panels were doing what they always do (as I assert anyway) in matching scoring to their perception of the payline and their gut feeling about whether a given app was deserving. What this assumes, of course, is that whatever biases were keeping the applications of the ESI-qualifying individuals from getting good scores in the past were still present and the reviewers were simply continuing the same behavior.

My concern with the new NOSI is, of course, that something similar will happen with the applications that qualify for this NOSI. There is the potential for a growing general suspicion (assumption? bias?) among study section reviewers that “oh, those URM PIs get special breaks” and then the scores will get even worse than they were before this idea started to percolate around the culture. It might be accelerated if the ICs generate explicit statements of relaxed paylines…but the campfire chatter about how the NOSI is being used will be sufficient.

Vigilance!

Vigilance is the thing. NIH cannot be permitted to put this in place, pay no attention to the results and “suddenly realize” five or ten years later that things are not working according to design.

__

*generally. Reviewers can be mistaken about paylines. They can be miscalibrated about scores and percentiles. They have a limited picture which only reflects their own knowledge of what is being funded. But still, there is an aggregate effect.

Updating the Erosion of the Purchase Power of the Modular NIH R01

I last updated this topic in mid 2018 using finalized BRDPI inflation adjustment numbers from 2016 and projections out to 2018. The latest numbers get us finalized values to 2019 and projections beyond that. There have been some minor changes from the last set of projections so it’s worth doing another update.

Biomedical Research and Development Price Index adjustments to the NIH R01 Modular limit ($250,000 per year direct costs). Red bars indicate the constant 2001 dollar valuation and black bars indicate the current-year dollars needed to match the limit in 2001.

As you can see, the unrelenting march of inflation means that the spending power of the $250K NIH modular budget limit is now projected to be $138,678 for Fiscal Year 2021. This translates to 55.5% of the value in 2001. Looking at this another way, it takes $442,457 in 2021 dollars to equal the spending power of $250,000 in 2001.

So when you start demanding changes in the Modular limit at NIH, the proper value to lobby for is $450,000 per year in direct costs.

This is also critical for scientists who are getting their start now to understand when receiving career advice on grant strategy from colleagues and mentors who were in mid career in 2001. Their concepts of what you should be able to accomplish with “one R01 NIH grant” were established under far different conditions. It is unlikely that they have fully adjusted their thinking. They may need to be educated on these specific numbers.

Of course, the NIH is fully aware of this situation and has rejected multiple internal proposals to adjust the modular limit in the past. I’ve seen slide decks. As you can anticipate, the reason is to keep funding as many grants as possible so as to juke the success rate stats and pump up award numbers. This is also why across-the-board 10% cuts come down in times of budget stress- cut a module off of 9 awards and you get the 10th one free.

Note that this reality means that it now takes two R01 grants to have a lab running at the production level that one R01 would cover in 2001. And as we know, the odds of getting funded for any given grant submission are worse. I really don’t want to re-calculate the cumulative probability of now at least two grants, given X number of submissions. It would be too depressing. [ok, one quick one. The probability of 1 award in 10 tries when the hit rate is 17.7% is 85.7%, as mentioned in that prior post. This drops to 55.1% for the probability of at least two awards in 10 tries. ]

NIH grant application topics by IC

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.

https://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2020/08/12/institute-and-center-award-rates-and-funding-disparities/

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?

In this week’s “Boomer Digest”

I once wrote a really whiny post. No, not that one. No…not that other one. Nope, not that either. No… sigh.

Okay, it was the one where I was whinging about Generation X never, ever reaching their true potential as a scientific generation in the US. Apparently I wrote that 5 years ago. One whole NIH R01 grant cycle ago. In 2011 when there was some hope brewing that we were coming out of the Great Bush Recession.

Welp. Thanks to COVID-19 it looks like we have more Recession type times ahead. And right on cue we are seeing various versions of those who are retired, and those who should be retiring, complaining about the stock market and what a hardship it is for them. My parents, as it happens, are in the first category. They are not by any means in any hardship for their retirement because of this, btw. Any part of their living money that is going to go down because of this Recession is only a part of what they live on. My academic parent secured a tenure track job back when they were accompanied with real, defined benefit pension deals. Generous ones by modern standards, where they even exist.

Also, they are actually pre-Boomer and the offspring of the Depression, which means that they don’t even like to spend money on themselves anyway. So they are fine.

In this week’s Boomer Digest, a Professor and ex-Dean at MIT has written an Op-Ed that I think is intended to be helpful. A Professor Fitzgerald writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that:

We senior scholars need to get out of the way, graciously and with dignity. A great deal of the power, glory, and heart of our departments and universities is there because of our work, but we need to recognize when it is time to pass that on to the next generation.

But along the way to this conclusion she reminds us that the Boomers got their jobs at a time when a prior generation was subject to mandatory age-related retirement.

Congress had just amended the age-discrimination law in 1986 to prohibit mandatory retirement when I started my academic career. Higher education was exempt, however, and institutions could still force professors to retire at 70. Yet at that point of my career, nothing could have been further from my mind than my own retirement plan.

LOL, “age-discrimination law” is a bit of a reveal. Ahem. Note that it was 70 instead of 65 or 68 like I seem to remember for other jobs….but still. Wait, hang on…the gravy train continued for a few more years?

As a young scholar, I believed that academics died with our boots on. One of the great things about being part of a “thinking” profession was that, barring illness or death, thinking would never end. My research and teaching would just get better with time, and my students and colleagues would value my wisdom and experience. I continued to believe that in 1993, when higher education’s exemption expired and professors could no longer be forced out at 70.

Let me do the math here. 48. The first of the Boomers were 48 years of age when mandatory retirement for those above them was ended. In 1979, the earliest Bridges to Independence includes, the age of first assistant professorship in US medical schools was 34 (Fig. 2-4a). As we know from Advancing the Nation’s Health Needs: NIH Research Training Programs (Figure 9-2), it was around 1979 before even 50% of PhDs in biomed were in postdocs for 1-2 years and 3-4 year postdoc stints were less than half as common. Round about 1973 when that graph starts, the first wave of Boomers were in their late 20s and had probably been sucking up jobs like crazy for two years by then. Note that the very first wave of the GenX were maybe clearing graduate school right around 1992ish as the last cohorts of Boomers were coming through.

Advancing the Nation’s Health Needs: NIH Research Training Programs (Figure 9-2)

It is only the very tail end of the Baby Boom generation that was facing their search for a faculty job without any sort of mandatory retirement in place to clear out the generation that came before them. Gen X has, in contrast, faced this for all of their professorial job seeking in academia.

The famous Figure 1-2 of the aforementioned Bridges to Independence report tells the NIH grant tale. For reference the front of the Boomer wave was 36 right when the chart starts in 1980. The GenX front edge was this age round about 2001. The difference in the percent of successful applicants for NIH funding could not be any more obvious. By that time, the cohort of funded applicants 35 years or younger was reduced to a fourth or a fifth as large as it had been when the Boomers were their age.

These two issues are, of course, related. Gen X could not secure jobs as early as did the Boomers and so were always 5+ years behind anyway.

This is not absolution. Quite the contrary.

Five years of building wealth is a long time. Especially when you add the 20 years of generational time into relative inflation of housing costs and student loan generating educational costs. Boomers had fewer outstanding student loan dollars because, Oh, that’s right, the prior generations built OUTSTANDING public-funded Universities for the Boomer’s to attend for very low costs. Which the Boomers promptly decided to stop paying for once they reached the workforce, voting age and started backing Republicanism with respect to taxes and public goods/investments, even if they otherwise pretended to be Democrats. Boomers had lower relative housing costs by far.

Which brings me back to the excuses Professor Fitzgerald outlines as she is, I think(?), attempting to chivvy her compatriots into decent behavior.

Not all of us can afford to. Money is a key reason why many faculty members keep working. It is hard to accept a big pay cut — which is what most retirement arrangements involve — when we are still the sole or primary breadwinner. In addition, some of us didn’t plan ahead financially. I know there are those (mostly economists?) who figured out their retirement options in their first month on the job. But the rest of us didn’t, and some of us even pushed aside financial planning until really late in the game, like at age 60, by which time our options were limited.

This is the part that is setting GenX SciTweeter’s collective hair on fire. OMG, we are thinking. After all these generational advantages you have enjoyed you STILL think you need MORE!??!!! Sole or primary breadwinner? O M G that brings up ANOTHER factor which is that modern academics cannot always just expect to support another non-working person as their spouse!!!!! Gen X academia just fricken EXPECTS that of course both spouses are going to be working, how else could we possibly survive?

Yes my hair is most assuredly on fire, Dear Reader.

Professor Fitzgerald’s piece had gone through a positive litany of deadwood accusations, fessing up to them, just before this. She admitted that her rapidly emeritizing peers didn’t actually want to work, shoved most onerous responsibilities in the department onto younger faculty and STILL says they feel entitled to cruise along, taking salary BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T PLAN WELL and can’t face losing any income. Even, I guess, faculty who got a Dean upgrade to their compensation some time ago and probably, going by the way things usually work, never really lost all of that extra compensation as the go back to regular faculty.

These, I will note are some of the faculty that write “just one more NIH grant” to make it to retirement. They said that last recession, btw, so this is round two for some of them. These are the faculty that NIH Program decides need the R56 Bridge or “just one last” pickup because they are otherwise out of funding and “would have to close their lab”.

It is easy to see the people who are in front of us. It is easy to see the people we have seen in front of us for decades.

It is really, really hard to see the people who haven’t had a chance yet.

It is even harder, impossible even, to see the opportunity cost of losing the full potential contribution of those who are “doing just fine“.

I don’t know what the solution is. I try as hard as I can on this blog to get people to grapple with the do-it-to-Julia problem of pointing the finger desperately at those other guys over there. I very sincerely mean that we are not going to solve all of the issues by putting some sort of mandatory retirement into place. Not at all. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain….realities. I try to get people to grapple with the zero sum nature of the NIH funding, the endless creation of new mouths to feed and the ever marching encrappification of life as a grant funded academic scientist. I occasionally muse about the wisdom of “saving” a lab with 5 years max to run, and 30+ years of wonderful opportunities taken, versus never letting one with 30 year future even start. Or even just saving one with 15 years to go instead. I wonder (okay, complain) about the wisdom of NIH’s tepid buyoff schemes that are occasionally bruited about-where emeritizing Profs are supposed to be a paid nanny to a younger person’s award.

Whenever I point out these generational facts of life, or even try to have a discussion, the Boomers freak the fuck out. How dare I? I’m morally certain that some of them have punished, and probably still do punish, me at grant review for daring to talk about careerism, priorities and the history of our business on this blog. Also for my apparent lack of respect for seniority when it came to my years appointed on a study section when I was just past early, early career. No doubt I get some Program Officer decisions going against me for the same reasons. They are Boomers too.

My online friends who happen to be Boomers get really, really angry with me too. How dare I? They didn’t enjoy any of this supposed Boomer privilege I am describing. Why, they are a woman in science! or a POC in science. Or something. They never had it good. Look at all the suffering they went through and are going through. THEY HAVE LESS GRANT SUCCESS THAN SOME GENXers OF THEIR ACQUAINTANCE SO CLEARLY THIS IS BULLSHIT!!!!! AIIIIIIEEEEE.

They can only look up and see how other people had it better. Because nobody can ever, ever, ever look themselves in the mirror and admit that they had some privileges relative to anyone else. Even their like to like comparison person in a different generation.

See, DM, they shout at YHN. You go first! You are so selfless, let’s see you retire. Or stop seeking grants. We’ll show you!

I get that in these discussions. One way or another. And as I’ve said repeatedly in similar discussion, I’m no different than anyone else. I like my job and I plan to work to keep it. I am far, far away from making any declarations, such as Professor Fitzgerald is making in her Op/Ed, about my retirement plans.

Don’t get me wrong. I feel privileged to have been given an opportunity for directing grant funded science, sure. I feel very, very lucky that the opportunity was handed to me by the world when it was, and not afterwards, since things kept getting crappier and crappier for the kids these days who followed me. And I don’t feel particularly entitled and deserving of an easy ride in the NIH grant getting game.

“Particularly”.

That’s the operative term here.

I do feel entitled to a fair shake. From the perspective of now, yes, but also from a historical perspective. And that my friends confounds me. Because this is what smells to me like falling a little too far into entitlement.

Is it? I don’t know. Is it MAGA thinking? Longing for a day that cannot possibly ever be returned to us? Can we never find ANY way to make things a little more livable in this career?

The corona crisis is giving us more time, seemingly, for online and offline navel gazing about the career. Me likey, obviously, but I’m not optimistic. We get new voices involved but we just keep treading the same ground.

And shouting at each other.

Like this.

The NIH Director Talked to Congress About Scientific Inspiration

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:

.@NIHDirector on the Hill: 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. Let me share just one example.

— NIH (@NIH) August 23, 2018

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:

.@NIHDirector on the Hill: A Vibrant Workforce is the 2nd key to success. Success lies in boosting the number of #NIH grants AND increasing the number of creative minds receiving those grants. So, we are using new metrics to evaluate success, shown in this chart below. pic.twitter.com/vSRZjZgCBj

— NIH (@NIH) August 23, 2018

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.

The Purchasing Power of the NIH Grant Continues to Erode

It has been some time since I made a figure depicting the erosion of the purchasing power of the NIH grant so this post is simply an excuse to update the figure.

In brief, the NIH modular budget system used for a lot of R01 awards limits the request to $250,000 in direct costs per year. A PI can ask for more but they have to use a more detailed budgeting process, and there are a bunch of reasons I’m not going to go into here that makes the “full-modular” a good starting point for discussion of the purchasing power of the typical NIH award.

The full modular limit was put in place at the inception of this system (i.e., for applications submitted after 6/1/1999) and has not been changed since. I’ve used the FY2001 as my starting point for the $250,000 and then adjusted it in two ways according to the year by year BRDPI* inflation numbers. The red bars indicate the reduction in purchasing power of a static $250,000 direct cost amount. The black bars indicate the amount the full-modular limit would have to be escalated year over year to retain the same purchasing power that $250,000 conferred in 2001.

(click to enlarge)

The executive summary is that the NIH would have to increase the modular limit to $450,000 $400,000** per year in direct costs for FY2018 in order for PIs to have the same purchasing power that came with a full-modular grant award in 2001.
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*The BRDPI inflation numbers that I used can be downloaded from the NIH Office of Budget. The 2017 and 2018 numbers are projected.

**I blew it. The BRDPI spreadsheet actually projects inflation out to 2023 and I pulled the number from 2021 projection. The correct FY2018 equivalent is $413,020.

Addressing the Insomnia of Francis Collins and Mike Lauer

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.

NIH reminds Universities not to keep paying harasser PIs from grant funds while suspended

On the May 1, 2018 the NIH issued NOT-OD-18-172 to clarify that:

NIH seeks to remind the extramural community that prior approval is required anytime there is a change in status of the PD/PI or other senior/key personnel where that change will impact his/her ability to carry out the approved research at the location of, and on behalf of, the recipient institution. In particular, changes in status of the PI or other senior/key personnel requiring prior approval would include restrictions that the institution imposes on such individuals after the time of award, including but not limited to any restrictions on access to the institution or to the institution’s resources, or changes in their (employment or leave) status at the institution. These changes may impact the ability of the PD/PI or other senior/key personnel to effectively contribute to the project as described in the application; therefore, NIH prior approval is necessary to ensure that the changes are acceptable.

Hard on the heels of the news breaking about long term and very well-funded NIH grant Principal Investigators Thomas Jessel and Inder Verma being suspended from duties at Columbia University and The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, respectively, one cannot help but draw the obvious conclusion.

I don’t know what prompted this Notice but I welcome it.

Now, I realize that many of us would prefer to see some harsher stuff here. Changing the PI of a grant still keeps the sweet sweet indirects flowing into the University or Institute. So there is really no punishment when an applicant institution is proven to have looked the other way for years (decades) when their well-funded PIs are accused repeatedly of sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination, retaliation on whistleblowers and the like.

But this Notice is still welcome. It indicates that perhaps someone is actually paying a tiny little bit of attention now in this post-Weinstein era.

When Congress boosts the NIH budget midyear weird stuff happens

Interesting comment about NIGMS recent solicitation of supplement applications for capital equipment infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/holz_lab/status/986310542678810624?s=21

If true this says some interesting things about whether NIH will ever do anything to reduce churn, increase paylines and generally make things more livable for their extramural workforce.

The Pirate Stronghold Strategy

Being a pirate probably really sucked.

Your odds of profiting from a raid were dodgy. Some of the victims fought back. The authorities might show up. Don’t even start with me about the storms.

If you were a pirate captain….whooo. Do you know how hard it is to get good help? How expensive to refit and provision a ship? And where do you store your money so that you don’t lose it and can afford to pay crew if the raid didn’t go well this time?

Especially when you are constantly on the run?

Wouldn’t it be great to have a place to go? Wouldn’t have to be fancy. Just some basic support to help you refit the ship, provision it and hire crew for your next raid on the coastal settlements.

This is what NIGMS has been doing with their strategy of getting sustenance grant funding to as many of their people as possible. Keep lots of privateer crews, sorry, labs, alive…but just barely. Then you know they will launch raids on the other ICs to bring in their booty. Which they will spend a lot of back at the pirate stronghold.

I blew it, here’s the version of 21st Century Cures that was passed by the House

ooops.

I had the wrong version. Thanks to Jocelyn Kaiser of Science mag for alerting me.

The 21st Century Cures site is here and I think the right version of the bill is here in PDF form.

Overtime rules

So. A federal judge* managed to put a hold on Obama’s move to increase the threshold for overtime exemption. Very likely any challenge to this will fail to succeed before a new Administration takes over the country. Most would bet there will be no backing for Obama’s plans under the new regime.

NIH is planning to steam ahead with their NRSA salary guidelines that met the Obama rule. Workplaces are left in a quandary. Many have announced their policies and issued notification of raises to some employees. Now they are not being forced to do so, at the last hour.

My HR department has signaled no recent changes in plans. Postdocs will get raises up to the Obama threshold. There are some other categories affected but I’ve seen no announcement of any hold on those plans either.

How about you folks? What are your various HR departments going to do in light of the de facto halt on Obama’s plans!

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*activist judge

The NIH has shifted from being an investor in research to a consumer of research

WOW. This comment from dsks absolutely nails it to the wall.

The NIH is supposed to be taking on a major component of the risk in scientific research by playing the role of investor; instead, it seems to operates more as a consumer, treating projects like products to be purchased only when complete and deemed sufficiently impactful. In addition to implicitly encouraging investigators to flout rules like that above, this shifts most of the risk onto the shoulders of investigator, who must use her existing funds to spin the roulette wheel and hope that the projects her lab is engaged in will be both successful and yield interesting answers. If she strikes it lucky, there’s a chances of recouping the cost from the NIH. However, if the project is unsuccessful, or successful but produces one of the many not-so-pizzazz-wow answers, the PI’s investment is lost, and at a potentially considerable cost to her career if she’s a new investigator.

Of course one might lessen the charge slightly by observing that it is really the University that is somehow investing in the exploratory work that may eventually become of interest to the buyer. Whether the University then shifts the risk onto the lowly PI is a huge concern, but not inevitable. They could continue to provide seed money, salary, etc to a professor who does not manage to write a funded grant application.

Nevertheless, this is absolutely the right way to look at the ever growing obligation for highly specific Preliminary Data to support any successful grant application. Also the way to look at a study section culture that is motivated in large part by perceived “riskiness” (which underlies a large part of the failure to reward untried investigators from unknown Universities compared with established PIs from coastal elite institutions).

NIH isn’t investing in risky science. It is purchasing science once it looks like most of the real risk has been avoided.

I have never seen this so clearly, so thanks to dsks for expressing it.