A rainy forecast for science in the US on a rainy afternoon - but with suggestions from top scientists on how to fix the forecast

I remember getting hints of the tough times scientists were having even before starting graduate school just before the Great Recession. Early on to mid-way through graduate school professors would try to ameliorate our worries that “this was a good time to be in school” because “things would get better by the time we graduated.” Then of course came the 2013 sequestration and by the end of graduate school I wasn’t hearing any more optimism.

Now, in my postdoc, there is nearly constant talk about the worry to find a job, the salary for postdocs who are often trying to raise a family, talk of a longstanding professor not having their grant renewed and another faculty member having to leave the department and start again somewhere else.

So much so that it is easy to become immune to the negative climate and accept that this is the way things are with funding rates in the teens, versus 30% in the early 2000s. After all, there is nothing that can be done, right? Also, let’s not get too down on ourselves as PhD graduates still have lower unemployment rates than the general population.

But then my PhD advisor sent me an article published in PNAS, written by four of the top scientists in the US including Dr. Bruce Alberts who was awarded the National Medal of Science last year. In the article they lay out the “systemic flaws” in the “US biomedical research ecosystem” and their proposals for slowly fixing the system.  

They explain that after WWII, America adopted the belief that research would expand indefinitely. What followed was a drastic increase in the size of universities and continual increase in the budget of the National Institute of Health (NIH), the major funding agency for research, up until the 1990s. But as funding slowed, there is an unprecedented amount of demand for grants due also to an increased workforce and increased costs of doing research.

The funding system:

The current funding system for science is generally a lengthy process where professors apply for research money (and increasingly their own salary – the authors point out) through grant agencies, which can be governmental or private. The proposed projects, as well as the previous publication record of the professor are evaluated. But the system rewards only those projects that will most likely succeed and produce results quickly (otherwise those grants are not renewed) and those that have a clear benefit to science.

But as many have pointed out, including the authors of the article, many scientific advances have come from basic scientific endeavors without any foreseeable translational benefit. The current system stands in the way of developing new approaches or paradigms.

Of course it makes sense that the National Institute of Health has an impetus to fund those studies that will likely improve the health of Americans. The alternative governmental source, the National Science Foundation, however only has $7 billion instead of the over $30 billion budget of the NIH.

Yesterday I attended a talk and was impressed by a pioneering technique to get crystallographic data on very small protein crystals using existing technology. Later the researcher said that he would not have been able to develop this method if he had been at a traditional research institution – he is at Janelia Farms, which is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) research campus where researchers are fully funded without having to apply for research grants and are highly encouraged to take on risky projects. But HHMI investigators are a vast minority of researchers. 

He echoed the same sentiments as those of Alberts, et al.: that the time-consuming process of applying for grants not only takes time away from scientific reflection but also can be a drain on excitement and motivation – in some ways, the most important resource scientists have. He has observed colleagues very excited about a new idea. But by the time that idea got NIH funding two years later, their enthusiasm was attenuated.

The pressure to publish:

Because high-impact publications are the gateway to getting more funding, the authors claim that the current hypercompetitive environment encourages researchers to both rush to publish their results, sometimes cutting corners, and also to exaggerate their findings and the significance of their work. They suggest that this has contributed to an upward trend in the inability to replicate published results.

I have personally observed that the inability to reproduce results has led to a lot of wasted time, money, and morale. If the results of an experiment differ from those published and accepted in the field, the first instinct is to check all the numerous variables, including methodology, reagents, and the experimenter themselves (especially if the researcher in question is a student).

Their solution is to de-emphasize the importance of publications in analyzing the merit of scientists. Rather funding agencies should also examine the quality of the researcher’s work and their overall contribution to the science field; have they contributed to a new break-through or paradigm shift?

The ever-increasing PhD workforce:

Scientists have been trying to call attention to the unsustainability of the increasing workforce for years. But science currently operates on a pyramidal scheme where low-paid graduate students and postdocs carry out the brunt of science with the hope of one day having a lab of their own. Thus each lab produces many more trainees (sometimes dozens) than can possibly replace that single professorial position. As a result, the number of PhD graduates is increasing while the number of academic positions is relatively stagnate. It used to be the private and governmental sector could absorb some of these graduates but now those markets are also becoming saturated.

They suggest, as have others, that the only viable option is to de-incentivize the over-reliance on students and postdocs by limiting the amount of research funds that can be used to pay their salaries and limiting the number of years postdocs could be paid from federal funds. Instead, they would be paid through training grants and personal fellowships: forcing universities to accept less graduate students. Additionally many have called for an increase in the salary of students and postdocs so that researchers would see staff scientists as a more viable option. A result of this is that laboratories would hire less people and lab sizes would shrink, but Alberts, et al. makes the argument that since staff scientists are more permanent, productivity would not decrease.

In addition, it would seem to me that professors would have more time to mentor the students and postdocs they do have.

Importantly the authors point out that increasing the NIH budget, while helpful, is not a permanent solution as this simply drives growth in institutions that will quickly eat up any new resources. Rather they call for gradual policy changes in how science is funded that will take effect over ten years.

As it takes a long time to change the direction of a bulky ship such as the science enterprise, I can only hope that there will be more communication between scientists and policy makers and more action in government. As these recommendations appear to be bipartisan there is no reason not to act now.