Books can be written about what is wrong with the NIH funding model that include an abundance of theatrics and pearl clutching about the excessive bureaucracy and the 100-pages of administrative information added to the 12-page science part, which always includes what we know to be a strong overstatement about how brilliant people get locked into their five year plan even when the first experiment that they do suggests that they should redirect (the redirecting happens all the time-while you can't say you are going to work on insulin resistance and then pivot to developing therapies for gliomas, NO ONE is going to complain of you discover something important about insulin resistance because you didn't do Aim 2 exactly as you said you would). And it is easy to look at specifics and say "right here, instead of doing X we should do Y" without looking at how you get to this point where your only choices are x and y. There is much to criticize here but you know for the last 30 years I have sat in meeting after meeting hearing about how the pay lines are going down, the average age at first R01 is increasing, R2s are now expecting their junior faculty to have NIH funding when they are up for tenure, renegotiation of indirect costs takes into account debt service on the new buildings that R1s are building and expanded research infrastructure so that they can aggressively hire tenure track faculty with ginormous startups on the assumption that these will be "paid back" in 5-7 years through new grants, expanding graduate programs that collectively keep graduating 10,000 PhDs in biomedical and biological sciences even though training funds (as opposed to research funds) have been pretty much flat since the numbers were more like 6,000, and even though some percentage of those graduates are not graduating into jobs that actually require a PhD and these large and growing programs (because the new faculty in the new buildings with the big startups "need" more grad students) "need" more administrators (and full disclosure-this has been great for my career) because the students expect a high level of service, and then they unionize because, you know, you are not meeting their very special service requests, driving up personnel costs and OK I will stop here. The short version of this rant is that universities are now hardwired systems of increasing fixed costs while appropriations stay flat or grow more slowly, and any change, no matter how rational, correct, or necessary is going to cause a good deal of disruption and collapse. And that is how my Tuesday is going.
I am here for a good evidence based rant! Agreed that our sector is due for a reckoning. There is little accountability when a new dean, or provost does new thing x and then leaves and new thing y is added on top, etc etc.
Great takes! I agree that learning from VC/industry could help reform some of the processes of NIH. Your points at the end about the core function of the NIH should not be lost on readers. The NIH research infrastructure, both intramural and extramurally, serves the public. In many ways, they also serve the business community by supporting ideas outside of quarterly scrutiny.
One would think that having an environment where evaluation of progress can focus on things outside of pure ROI would allow people to think more creatively about their proposals. Creativity in the scope of the science is welcome. As you note, this also takes a reflection on the core functions of NIH.
Books can be written about what is wrong with the NIH funding model that include an abundance of theatrics and pearl clutching about the excessive bureaucracy and the 100-pages of administrative information added to the 12-page science part, which always includes what we know to be a strong overstatement about how brilliant people get locked into their five year plan even when the first experiment that they do suggests that they should redirect (the redirecting happens all the time-while you can't say you are going to work on insulin resistance and then pivot to developing therapies for gliomas, NO ONE is going to complain of you discover something important about insulin resistance because you didn't do Aim 2 exactly as you said you would). And it is easy to look at specifics and say "right here, instead of doing X we should do Y" without looking at how you get to this point where your only choices are x and y. There is much to criticize here but you know for the last 30 years I have sat in meeting after meeting hearing about how the pay lines are going down, the average age at first R01 is increasing, R2s are now expecting their junior faculty to have NIH funding when they are up for tenure, renegotiation of indirect costs takes into account debt service on the new buildings that R1s are building and expanded research infrastructure so that they can aggressively hire tenure track faculty with ginormous startups on the assumption that these will be "paid back" in 5-7 years through new grants, expanding graduate programs that collectively keep graduating 10,000 PhDs in biomedical and biological sciences even though training funds (as opposed to research funds) have been pretty much flat since the numbers were more like 6,000, and even though some percentage of those graduates are not graduating into jobs that actually require a PhD and these large and growing programs (because the new faculty in the new buildings with the big startups "need" more grad students) "need" more administrators (and full disclosure-this has been great for my career) because the students expect a high level of service, and then they unionize because, you know, you are not meeting their very special service requests, driving up personnel costs and OK I will stop here. The short version of this rant is that universities are now hardwired systems of increasing fixed costs while appropriations stay flat or grow more slowly, and any change, no matter how rational, correct, or necessary is going to cause a good deal of disruption and collapse. And that is how my Tuesday is going.
I am here for a good evidence based rant! Agreed that our sector is due for a reckoning. There is little accountability when a new dean, or provost does new thing x and then leaves and new thing y is added on top, etc etc.
Great takes! I agree that learning from VC/industry could help reform some of the processes of NIH. Your points at the end about the core function of the NIH should not be lost on readers. The NIH research infrastructure, both intramural and extramurally, serves the public. In many ways, they also serve the business community by supporting ideas outside of quarterly scrutiny.
One would think that having an environment where evaluation of progress can focus on things outside of pure ROI would allow people to think more creatively about their proposals. Creativity in the scope of the science is welcome. As you note, this also takes a reflection on the core functions of NIH.
Time will tell!