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Up To 1000 NIH Investigators Dropped Out Last Year
sciencehabit writes "New data show that after remaining more or less steady for a decade, the number of investigators with National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding dropped sharply last year by at least 500 researchers and as many as 1000. Although not a big surprise—it came the same year that NIH's budget took a 5% cut—the decline suggests that a long-anticipated contraction in the number of labs supported by NIH may have finally begun."
Without something to anchor your 500-1000 number, who will know how outraged they need to be?
Now that the anti-tax movement has won, we can look forward to the destruction of the greatest source of innovation the U.S. -- and the world -- has ever seen.
Get ready for the visionaries who tell us that the source of American innovation is guys working in garages, and all we have to do is lower taxes on garages to unleash the flow of productivity.
We all know how the 'bad' researchers game the system by hyperciting to up their impact numbers, maybe they know they can't pull that shit w/ open-access & have moved on to the private sector? IDK, just pure speculation from someone outside the field...
NIH employs roughly 19,000 people. Given the 5% cut in budget and projects, can we expect a 5% reduction in staff? Not holding my breath on that one.
I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.
And where do you think practicing doctors get their knowledge? That's assuming they keep up with current research, of course.
The thing that makes me cringe is when I hear from physicians, "well, in my experience..." On occasion, they happen to be right and other times, well ....
Physicians are human and are subject to the same bias and irrational thinking as the rest of us. Nothing can replace a well designed study where the results can be reproduced.
And the nice thing about the NIH, they fund studies that have no commercial value (at least in the short term) that add to our knowledge.
Some "stupid" study may reveal something that can be used later or spur someone with an idea of their own.
This mentality of focusing on short term ROI has destroyed our innovation in the US. The last really innovative thing that came out of this country was the Internet and the roots for that were laid down in the 70s.
It's really sad.
"Dropped Out" implies it was the decision of the researchers to quit.
Instead it was the decision of the NIH to quit funding them.
Most NIH funded investigators are Ph.D.s not M.D.s. Those are two different kinds of doctors.
> theÃNational Institutes of Health is an arm of big pharma, get a clue kids
You're flying kidding me right? Do you know what NIH is? What kind of dealing they have with big pharmas? They have strict rules on big pharmas involvement. If you don't have proof, don't spout nonsense, you asshole!
New data show that after remaining more or less steady for a decade ...
Did they even look at the graph? It shows a steady decline from 2004 and 2008. The current level had not reached the 2008 level yet.
I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.
There's lots of research that needs doing that doesn't require extraordinary talent - just lots and lots of work (and funding to pay for that work). For example, depending on how,you count, there are somewhere on the order of 20,000 human proteins but many of these proteins have not been studied in detail - or even manually curated/annotated.
But while we could argue about whether there are enough science jobs, I would agree that there are far more science PhDs than available jobs - while there are obviously too few medical doctors to provide an adequate level of health care. On the PhD side, an obvious solution it to switch over to relying on career scientists for routine lab work as opposed to graduate students. That way, you don't have a situation where the typical principle investigator churns out 5-10 PhDs over the course of the PI's career - leading to an imbalance of roughly 5-10 science PhD for every available principle investigator position. And on the MD side, an obvious solution is to simple increase the quota of medical school admissions.
What's interesting, though, is that the cost of (full) genome sequencing has now fallen to a bit above $1,000 (with certain minimum order requirements). Analyzing a genome is a lot of work and, while the development of some good software (analysis pipelines) will undoubtedly help, genome analysis is almost certainly going to require more time than the typical MD has available. But this is a task that's well suited to PhDs (e.g. in bioinformatics and related fields) - and there's lots of such PhDs bouncing around from one low paying job to another while hoping to eventually land that elusive principle investigator position.
At the moment, the MDs are trying hard to keep the PhDs out of medicine - on the grounds that a PhD who has, for example, spent years teaching community college would be unable to explain clinical genetics to the typical patient - but that the MD, who has at most five minutes per patient, can somehow convey a full understanding of clinical genetics in that mere five minutes. As more and more people have their genome's sequenced, it remains to be seen whether the MDs can be successful in maintaining their monopoly hold on medical care.
"Physicians are human and are subject to the same bias and irrational thinking as the rest of us. Nothing can replace a well designed study where the results can be reproduced."
Yep. Most physicians also suffer from the serious flaw that they are terrified of appearing not to know something. When was the last time you heard a physician say "these symptoms are unusual in this combination; let me do a little research and get back to you"?
I personally know many NIH-funded researchers who work on things big pharma doesn't care about. Like malaria vectors.
"Entitlements" are things that people are entitled to.
If I spend 40 years working and putting a big chunk of my income into Social Security and Medicare because the deal was that I'll get it when I'm 65, I think I'm entitled to get it when I'm 65.
You've been talking to the wrong doctors.
I've run into a lot of doctors who would admit that they didn't know something.
I've also run into a few doctors who admitted that they were wrong. As Carl Sagan said, it doesn't happen often but it does happen.
Of course a lot of them were research-oriented, like the guys who get NIH grants.
You ought to get better doctors.
Without something to anchor your 500-1000 number, who will know how outraged they need to be?
And without knowing what those investigators were doing neither number is particularly useful. That's 1000 investigators and their entire lab staff most of them being scientists doing useful research not administrators etc. Unfortunately this doesn't just affect the current generation of scientists, it affects the next generation too. Not all of these labs will close, but there will certainly be a lot less capacity to take students and post docs. How this will impact research is pretty hard to predict, unfortunately it looks a bit more like the blunderbuss approach than the precision cull of the herd with a rifle and scope.
I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.
Where do you think these practicing doctors get the drugs they use to treat people?
Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
Only if the money you spent was saved. If it was spent on other things (like paying entitlements of other people), then you weren't paying for your retirement. You were paying for retirements of other people. And in that case, and I am sorry to say this because it is very harsh, but any "entitlements" you receive is charity. Because if it wasn't saved (and it wasn't), then it's funded by other people. And just because your house got robbed, you don't get a carte blanche to rob your neighbor's house.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
it's that we're losing _any_. We've had 30 years of constant productivity increases. These are the sort of jobs we were promised would replace all the Manufacturing jobs that went away for those 30 years. Now some of them are going away. It's suppose to be growing, not shrinking.
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Democrat in Name Only. There's several of them. Plus the Dems aren't really in power. The Republicans have threatened to drive this country over a cliff multiple times (debt ceiling). This last time the Pres said: "Go for it, I think we can survive and you won't", but it wasn't that he called their bluff. They were never bluffing. The only reason they backed down is they thought they'd be hurt themselves....
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Austerity driven stupidity intentionally trying to destabilize this country. It's too bad we can't be strict constitutionalists and call up the militia to put down the insurrection or the far right fanatics, anti-science, anti-education, anti-Christian right. It really is simple: stupidity doesn't lead to innovation.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Have you ever heard of something called `insurance'? You should look it up, it's pretty nifty.
Where is this magical place you think the Social Security Administration should have been saving your contributions? In the stock market? Cubes of cash? Mutual funds? Maybe something safer? Treasury bonds? Well, that's what they did.
Of that 29 billion or so we spend per year on nih research, how much do you think has any chance in hades of producing a medicine. Don't get me wrong, I'm for lots of research, but we now know a lot about our top maladies and so a lot of basic research that once got a pass from the nih will now go begging because it is of dubious utility (and down right un novel). I have spent my career chasing phantoms (other people's ideas) and I know that we all oversell the possible medical value.
There are very simple solutions to this, and that involves not giving the bulk of research money to the same big bloated labs. To do this you must 'stir-up' the allocation business (it is!) to direct younger smaller researches get more the the pie.
No, simple - well known by those in the system - solutions... they just don't follow the same beat as the psycho leaders, is all.
We wouldn't want well established people to be challenged by new sharp people - keep them begging at the door, as we do now in all fields.
Time to wake up.
So they removed a thousand employees getting a $100,000 each to find new ways to drug so-called untermenschen while calling it a cure — sounds good to me.
You don't know how banks work, do you?
They're not just holding your money in a big vault.
It's actually being loaned out to others, in exchange for those others paying the bank back.
Some of them won't, but that's why you only get so much interest.
The various branches of the military are often quite interested in the basic sciences performed with NIH funding.
If one honestly felt that the NIH was unconstitutional, one could just make it a branch of the DOD.
Your comment is insightful only by having demonstrated that your sense of scope is limited purely by the letterhead that things are written on.
Actually like 30% of the grants they fund include an MD-PhD principal investigator or collaborator.
I take the Constitution seriously when it says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" in the Bill of Rights.
You, on the other hand, seem to take great satisfaction from flippantly ignoring it.
On the other hand, nothing as innovative as the Internet has come out of any country since the '70s. So I'm not sure that this is the best evidence for the decline of innovation in the US.
Where is this magical place you think the Social Security Administration should have been saving your contributions? In the stock market? Cubes of cash? Mutual funds? Maybe something safer? Treasury bonds? Well, that's what they did.
Treasury bonds aren't safe, primarily because of the huge amount of them that were sold to "borrow" all of the Social Security funds, plus a bunch more money, that could then be misspent on other things. Social Security is left holding a bunch of debt that will not be repaid, and we're told that means it will be solvent forever. That's not how it works if you want your currency to exist longer than Zimbabwe's did.
Actually like 30% of the grants they fund include an MD-PhD principal investigator or collaborator
So, just like the OP stated.
That would be nice if that were the way SS and Medicare actually worked. What really happens is the money you paid during your 40 years of working went to pay people who were retired while you were working (people who were retired when the SS program first started got a free ride). And in the future you'll be receiving money from the people who are working while you are retired.
Basically, it's the Asian cultural model where when the parents retire, their kids pay for their living expenses. Except on a national scale. The "entitlements" are not something you are entitled to. It's just an arbitrary allocation of a percentage of the kids' current income (currently 12.4% for SS, 2.9% for Medicare).
There's a token attempt by the accountants to make sure the numbers balance out long-term, but it's subject to things completely out of the accountants' control - like people's lifespans increasing, or couples having fewer babies. At a minimum, the retirement age needs to be scaled to keep pace with average lifespan for the numbers to balance out. But it's been stuck at 65 since the 1940s when life expectancy at birth was about 62, and life expectancy for a 50-year old was about 70. Currently the life expectancy for those ages are 78 and 81 respectively. So we have fewer people paying into SS (couples having fewer babies remember), and the people who qualify for SS collecting 3x as much money (living 3x longer in retirement) as when the program was first started. That's what's killing the budget and SS/Medicare.
Nice sample of one proof you've got there, AC.
Being one of these 500 to 1000 scientists I can only say to young people: Don't pursue any science career anymore - it is probably not gonna feed you.
The Social Security tax rate is 12.4% up to a maximum of $117,000.
If we were to eliminate the maximum, and charge everyone 12.4% of all their income, that would solve any problem the Social Security system had.
Because of the way income is distributed, people with income over $117,000 in the aggregate earn about as much as everybody else put together. So that's where the money is, and they can easily afford it.
People may be living longer now, but they also have a higher level of disability. For example, I saw in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that 20% of people over 50 years of age have mobility problems such that they can't walk a mile. So they couldn't do a job that required walking.
Over the age of 65, peoples' abilities decline and their handicaps increase significantly. There are people who can continue working, but they're exceptional. For example, I know an actor who made a good living but he had to stop working in his 70s because he kept forgetting his lines.
Most other developed countries have a retirement age of 60-65 (sometimes younger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Is the American economic system so inefficient that we have to force people to work longer than they do in other developed countries -- even socialist countries?
Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
I don't know the breakdown per-disease, but FYI, only about a quarter of all drugs were invented with public funding. In most cases academic research greatly informed the development of new drugs (as intended), but there's a huge gap between "this mutation causes bowel cancer, maybe if we inhibit that protein it will stop progression" to "this drug stops bowel cancer". (Huge gap = many years, at least hundreds of millions of dollars.) In the case of AIDS, academic research has been focused on vaccines, whereas the current best-in-class anti-HIV drugs really have been mostly the work of the drug companies.
True on Social Security, but Medicare has been highly undercapitalized since its inception, due to medical cost inflation and recipients' expectations which outstripped all projections when Medicare tax rates were set. Thus your Medicare taxes (and everyone else's) are very unlikely to pay (even accounting for hypothetical investment gains) for your Medicare expenses in old age. The Medicare system is unsustainable as is; the oldsters who got it already got a great deal but sooner or later that will have to change.
The Social Security tax rate is 12.4% up to a maximum of $117,000.
If we were to eliminate the maximum, and charge everyone 12.4% of all their income, that would solve any problem the Social Security system had.
Only the employee's contribution (6.2% of wages) is capped. The employer contributes 6.2% of wages, with no maximum. But you didn't say "12.4% of wages, you said 12.4% of all income, which would include income from other sources (e.g., interest and investment). Is that what you meant? I don't have a problem with removing the cap on wages, even though it would cost me thousands of dollars every year. But I do have a problem with the idea of a payroll tax on income derived from investing money on which I've already paid the tax.
Actually, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 provides for this alongside defence spending. "The Congress shall have Power To . . . provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; . . ." As spending that doesn't improve the welfare of a specific state or individual, but rather improves the welfare of the whole, NIH spending qualifies as constitutionally appropriate spending just as defense spending does. In contrast to entitlements (which provide for the specific welfare of individuals and therefore not "general") spending of this type has typically not been constitutionally controversial (though it may be politically so).
Is that some number between 0 and 1000, or could it also be negative?
What you are trying to say is that anyone who disagrees with you is less of a patriot.
Let's start with the NIH main campus, in Bethesda, MD, where somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people work every day. That include maintenance, cafeteria and hospital staff. If between 500 and 1000 left, that's 2.5%-5% reduction.
Then consider the fact that it's probably the largest pure medical research institution in the world. Note that I said "pure research" - we're not talking about billions used to find a drug that's equivalent to, or only marginally better than an existing drug... because your patent on that one's about to run out.
And I suppose most of you are twentysomethings who never get sick, and will live forever (aka willfully ignorant children).
And the US, biggest economy in the world (for the moment) can't keep the budget up, since we have to have 15% or lower taxes on the people whose annual income is larger than most countries, because, heaven forfend, they might have to scrimpt and save, and maybe would be unable to buy that next Hawaiian island....
This sucks.
mark
Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
The one I was thinking about was AZT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Government-funded researchers developed AZT, tied it up in a package, and handed it to Burroughs-Welcome. Burroughs-Welcome did have some expertise in retroviruses, but they weren't indispensable.
FYI, only about a quarter of all drugs were invented with public funding.
I'd like to know where you get that figure. And I'd like to drill down to see how much of that is new classes of drugs vs. me-too drugs that just stick on a methyl group somewhere.
In most cases academic research greatly informed the development of new drugs (as intended), but there's a huge gap between "this mutation causes bowel cancer, maybe if we inhibit that protein it will stop progression" to "this drug stops bowel cancer". (Huge gap = many years, at least hundreds of millions of dollars.)
There's a problem with the term "invented." Most drugs are the result of a long chain of efforts from basic research to drugstore. The drug companies contribute to parts of that, usually in the later stages of human research and industrial production.
But government agencies are quite capable of doing the human research. The VA for example has often done the best studies of drugs used in cardiology and other conditions that are common among their patient population.
And many of the drug companies now contract out their actual drug production to factories in China and India. The FDA does inspection and quality control.
Alexander Flemming discovered, or invented, penicillin in a university lab. He refused to patent it, because he wanted to give it to the world. During WWII, the British gave all their penicillin research to the U.S. government, who gave it to Pfizer, who worked out the commercial development. Pfizer, in contrast, patented everything they did and kept it to themselves.
In the case of AIDS, academic research has been focused on vaccines, whereas the current best-in-class anti-HIV drugs really have been mostly the work of the drug companies.
I'd have to look that up, but AZT was developed as I described. I'll give the drug companies credit where it's deserved, but they have always been supporters of NIH funding.
Whenever the Wall Street Journal had an editorial demanding that the government shut down NIH funding and unleash the creativity of the free market in its place, even the right-wing conservative corporate executives in the pharmaceutical industry came to the NIH's defense.
Right, except that's not what they did. They didn't invest the money. They paid it in benefits. Investing money produces a return. Paying out benefits does not produce a return. The analogy to banks simply does not hold.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.