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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?
On which planet has the anti-tax movement won?
That would be this one.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
> 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!
The GDP is doing just fine as usual. If the people who actually did all the work got to see those gains, we might get somewhere.
Actually, current approval rates for grants are around 10-15% and often grants that are funded are typically facing budget reductions at the time of approval, without any change in the scope or specific aims of the proposal. In many cases the cost of research is increasing but the funds available are not increasing at the same rate, thus few projects are being funded.
As an actual researcher, let me state that your post has little to no bearing on reality. That is, open-access journals do not prevent an individual or group of individuals from artificially inflating various publication metrics. Moreover, agencies look at much more than those metrics, e.g., research output, research impact, past publication venues, and the number of students who are supported and are expected to graduate under a grant, when deciding how to dole out funding.
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.
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.
Once it was "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage"
Now I can see a time when our chickens are on pot, and we'll be living in garages...
(it does make for a more trippy class of omelets...)
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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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You and I must be reading different journals.
Perspective: Asia's Ascent — Global Trends in Biomedical R&D Expenditures
January 2, 2014
N Engl J Med 2014; 370:3-6
Owing to cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011, the NIH budget for fiscal year 2013 was reduced by $1.7 billion, to $29.2 billion — a 5.5% reduction that continued a trend of declining federal funding for biomedical research that began in 2003.2
Our analysis reveals that U.S. inflation-adjusted R&D expenditures and the U.S. share of global expenditures decreased from 2007 through 2012. The decline is remarkable because the United States has provided a majority of the funding for biomedical R&D globally for the past two decades — a share that some previous analyses suggested was as high as 70 to 80%.2 Moreover, the decline was driven almost entirely by reduced investment by industry, not the public sector, between 2007 and 2012. Sequestration of NIH funding in 2013 and beyond will exacerbate this reduction by causing U.S. public-sector expenditures to decline.
Although our data set has its limitations, our findings reveal a decline in U.S. financial competitiveness in biomedical R&D and may have implications for the debate over appropriate federal policy in this area. The lack of a coordinated national biomedical R&D strategy is disappointing, at a time when mature economies such as those of Japan and Europe have maintained their level of investment in this area.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/ar...
Funding of US biomedical research, 2003-2008.
JAMA. 2010 Jan 13;303(2):137-43. doi: 10.1001/jama.2009.1987.
Funding of US biomedical research, 2003-2008.
CONCLUSION: After a decade of doubling, the rate of increase in biomedical research funding slowed from 2003 to 2007, and after adjustment for inflation, the absolute level of funding from the National Institutes of Health and industry appears to have decreased by 2% in 2008.
and "Health" spending is up 41% during the same period. "Energy" spending is up 2400%.
Of course health spending is up. When you spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on one website that doesn't work, what do you expect?
(Not to mention that it does not conform to the government's own privacy laws, etc. I am still waiting for that one to blow up.)
Oops... we shouldn't forget "energy" spending. Solyndra, Evergreen, Beacon, SunPower, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
You were doing fine for about one sentence. Then you got all partisan. Look at what the economy has done under the reps, look at what it's done under the dems, realize that most of the presidents who presided over a time of economic health were receiving a windfall that had nothing to do with their administration and little to do with the prior administration. For example, the economy surged under Clinton, but it was a bubble that would have happened no matter who was president.
I don't know if the libertarians could improve anything, but I know the republicrats are not the solution.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not a big Obama fan (I voted Green the past two elections), but claiming the Democrats have controlled spending for the past 6 years is absurd. The Republicans have controlled the house and the Democrats have done a poor job of negotiating with them (although I'll be willing to accept that the Democrat's goals might not actually differ from the Republicans' as much as they claim).
On the minimum wage, some graphs of the historical value adjusted for inflation show that $10.10 is in fact matching inflation. It just seems like a large jump because real wages have been decreasing for decades.
I agree that Obama and the Democratic party have shown poor leadership and handling of the economic crisis, just nitpicking some details.
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.
Stop listening to the right-wing echo chamber.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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?
The reality of our existence for the last 5 years or so has been very partisan.
Well, you say that, but in actuality the rich run both parties, and the rich are getting what they want for the most part, and the rest of us are getting the short straws. This apparently partisan conflict is simply in the script. They re-examine the script every four years or so, decide if they'll run the same president, proceed to have him elected, and then we proceed to blame all of our problems on partisan politics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"