[HN Gopher] The need to reform the National Institutes of Health...
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The need to reform the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding
process
Author : jseliger
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-05-04 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newscience.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (newscience.org)
| DennisP wrote:
| A while back I read _The Death of Cancer_ by Vincent DeVita,
| former director of the National Cancer Institute. It 's a great
| book, with a lot of stories about his experiences in research and
| with patients over a 50-year career. He argues that progress
| against cancer has slowed down significantly since the early
| days, largely because of the NIH and FDA.
| jhart99 wrote:
| As a NIH funded researcher, everything here is spot on.
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| Agreed, from another NIH-funded researcher. I was impressed
| with the thoroughness and balanced perspective in this
| whitepaper.
| bumby wrote:
| How does it get fixed though?
|
| From the article: > _What is relevant is how the public
| perceives these methods._
|
| So much of the problem seems about political risk, but that
| seems to be a feature and not a bug of publicly funded
| programs. We generally _want_ the public to have a say in how
| their tax dollars get spent and we want there to be
| transparency in the process. And yet those two factors combine
| to create many of the problems in the article.
|
| Is it a misalignment of researchers and the general public in
| terms of priorities? Is it an issue of educating the public
| about the intent of fundamental research? Something else?
| derbOac wrote:
| As someone who was formerly a tenured professor, and left in
| part because of the issues in this piece, I agree.
|
| > The universities may have gotten "addicted" to the influx of
| federal funds, and adapted their operations based around
| absorbing more federal money.
|
| This is an understatement. It's not "may have"; one can
| eliminate the "may". At many universities currently the tail
| wags the dog. There have been many high-profile examples of
| this in recent years. It used to not be this way, and the time
| period identified in the piece has been highlighted by many
| papers on the topic.
| avs733 wrote:
| just for those less familiar, it may be useful to note that
| the shift towards federal funds is typically linked to
| decreases in local funding for higher education.
|
| It isn't 'organic' there has been an outside forcing
| function.
| nickff wrote:
| The shift to dependency on federal funding happened during
| and after the second world war. The federal government
| discovered they could speed up research by pouring money
| into universities, but never accounted for how this would
| change incentive structures, and eventually warp the
| universities.
| derbOac wrote:
| That's true although in my discussions with university
| administration, there is a causal arrow that points a bit
| in the other direction too. I've had conversations with
| university presidents and other administration (in semi-
| private contexts) where it's basically stated "we don't
| need to advocate for state funding because we can sustain
| ourselves on federal funds."
|
| I note this not to criticize the administration (although
| you can do that), but to point out that this dynamic has
| repercussions in terms of incentives. If you're a
| university president or provost and getting pressure from a
| conservative legislature to not depend on public funding
| (which really means "state funding" to them, but that's
| another discussion), and all of a sudden the federal
| government becomes this cash flow source, you're going to
| run to it, and leverage that as "being a good citizen" with
| the legislature. I think the causal directions go in both
| ways and have these kind of amplifying effects.
| avs733 wrote:
| I have heard the same...but I honestly think that is a
| 'here lets not try' more so than a 'we wouldn't make use
| of it'.
|
| Totally agree with you on the rest.
|
| What is interesting is the admins now finding that those
| same legislators won't leave you alone even if they strip
| all your funding. They will mess with you for cheap
| points and sport.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Yes, this seems like a big problem. Need to reform the NIH
| and crack down on the universities.
|
| > _On the other hand, there is definitely evidence that
| university administrators are motivated by indirect cost
| rates. In the most severe cases, some universities levy a
| "tax" on researchers for obtaining grants from non-NIH
| sources. In the case of Columbia University, the tax is equal
| to the NIH indirect cost rate minus the other institution's
| indirect cost rate. That percentage is taken out of the
| researcher's direct costs. This policy dramatically
| diminishes the value of non-NIH grants._
|
| > _For example, if a Columbia University (62.5% NIH indirect
| cost rate) researcher receives a grant from the Bill and
| Melinda Gates Foundation (10% indirect rate), with a direct
| cost of $1 million and a total value of $1.1 million, a
| whopping $525,000 intended for the researcher is redirected
| to the university, bringing the direct cost benefits to the
| researcher down from $1 million to $475,000. And frankly,
| that's underselling the transfer, because non-profit grants
| tend to be much smaller than NIH grants; once the tax is
| paid, the remaining money might not even be worth applying
| for._
| secabeen wrote:
| The question of whether 62.5% indirect cost rate is
| appropriate is a good one, but 10% is certainly not enough.
| Indirect costs include many things that are required in
| order to perform research, including real estate, power,
| building maintenance, administrative staff for payroll,
| financial management, regulatory reporting, technology,
| infrastructure, safety, etc. etc.
|
| What else is a university to do if non-profits try to free-
| ride on the infrastructure paid for by NIH?
| acjo wrote:
| The article lays out a major issue with the concentration of
| extramural funding at a few elite institutions. One additional
| reason that the geographical and institutional concentration of
| extramural funding is so harmful is the 'brain drain' effects at
| research institutions that face uphill climbs to access funding.
| A significant part of every grant application is the
| institutional support, which lists core facilities and other
| resources that are funded by the indirect cost recovery from
| government grants. This creates a positive feedback loop where
| grants fund resources that enable grants to be awarded. You can
| imagine how institutions without large amounts of NIH research
| can struggle with this.
|
| Then you have to consider that many of these institutions are
| Universities with undergraduate populations. Undergraduates are
| engaged more and more in research exposure, which is becoming a
| significant prerequisite for graduate school and medical school
| (and especially for combined degree programs like MD/PhD
| programs). At universities without lots of external funding, such
| as NIH or NSF funding, it doesn't take a lot to imagine that
| there are knock on effects creating geographic and structure
| imbalances in the education that can be offered at a state school
| in say Wyoming or Nevada.
|
| Measures, like the Grant Support Index, would have curbed the
| worst excesses of this imbalance, by preventing super start
| researchers from effectively 'renting' out their name as a co-PI
| for research they were tangentially involved in. Likewise, NIH
| could recognize the need for biomedical investigation to be a
| 50-state wide enterprise leveraging institutions across the
| country rather than something to be pursued by elite
| institutions, many of which concentrated in a few metro areas.
|
| I have no evidence, but I do wonder that when we concentrate this
| knowledge and learning in a few metro areas, is it really a
| surprise that scientific literacy and health literacy can be
| quite low in the same areas we are failing to invest in?
| adlfkjlkjalwe wrote:
| glofish wrote:
| > _In 2017, 1% of NIH extramural grantees received 11% of the
| total funds. The top 10% of researchers received over 40% of the
| funds.36 37 This is a larger divide in wealth inequality than for
| the general U.S. population, where the top 10% of earners
| received 40% of (post-tax) income_
|
| What the above does not capture is much work it takes to submit
| and prepare a grant.
|
| Not getting a grant also means months upon months of lost work,
| and years of enthusiasm out the window.
|
| Multiply the 50K unsuccessful grants by 10x to get a magnitude of
| the wastage.
| jhart99 wrote:
| This captures the problem I have with this system. The wasted
| effort is absolutely immense. Rejected grants do come back with
| comments so you can try to fix the perceived problems. You can
| also consult with the NIH about how you can improve. But
| sometimes your idea is just not going to get funded.
|
| The current pay line is about 12%. On average a researcher is
| going to end up failing 7/8 times. They are going to waste
| years of effort going back and forth to get a single R01. I
| don't remember the statistics but it is something like 8-10
| years for a new professor to land their first R01. At my
| institute, you are basically required to have 2 R01 grants to
| keep things running. That means your job is not to do science
| at all, but to be a grant writing machine that gets enough
| funding so your lab can do whatever it is you want to do. On
| some level academic science is really marketing your brand of
| science.
| caycep wrote:
| I was one of the ones that didn't play the political game
| right (choosing mentors, proper faculty appts etc) so my
| grant got tossed aside (triaged). Then the choice is to
| either do another 5 years as essentially a post-doc while the
| chairman grumbles that you're costing his department money,
| vs. going into practice and making double what the NIH
| protected salary would be for a K grant, and the choice was
| clear.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| What the NIH is willing to fund has very little bearing on its
| impact to society as well. You can have a disease that has
| significant impact to millions of lives and it will have $1
| million in funding while another that has less impact and has
| 1/1000th of the sufferers receives $100s of millions. The way the
| funding is assigned is not in anyway based on the merit of the
| disease being studied and how many lives it would save or
| improve.
|
| Even labs on the NIH revered institutions list struggle to get
| funding for the unloved diseases that really need more money.
| There was a assay diagnostic that showed energy deficits at a
| cellular level in ME/CFS and long covid and the NIH passed on
| funding it, for the third time in a row. That impacts millions
| upon millions of sufferers of a very real and growing condition.
| Its so bad that the bulk of funding in a lot of cases comes from
| private donations and organizations like the open medicine
| foundation which are tiny but in comparison to funding from the
| NIH its substantial.
|
| The NIH has done a terrible job at assigning research funds from
| what I can see, a system of appropriate merit would make a lot
| more sense otherwise no progress will be made in extremely
| debilitating and painful and unknown to the public conditions.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| you basically get NIH grants from socializing with the people
| who give NIH grants
|
| just ask any NIH grant receiving professors
| cogman10 wrote:
| An argument (all be it, probably not a great one) for funding
| smaller and less impactful disease research is that major
| diseases are likely to see research from private medicine
| (because that's where the money is).
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