Originally published on March 2, 2015
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Biomedical researchers are training in healthy numbers, but
many are finding that the transition from their first post-doctoral position to
a lab of their own is taking too long, or not happening at all.
It’s a troubling development – with stark implications of
American innovation — that may be leading many talented young scientists to
look elsewhere for employment, lured in part by high pay.
As noted in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month,
demand is strong for science and math-oriented job-applicants, as employees
with STEM skills can expect to earn 21 percent more than their less educated
colleagues.
The longer we wait to address this issue, the more we risk
losing a generation of researchers – and all the advances in medical science
they would have made.
Ronald J. Daniels, President of John Hopkins University, is
ringing the alarm bell. In a recent article for the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, he delivers the bad news: most researchers aren’t winning
their first grant until they are 45 years old, compared with age 38 in 1980. In
2010, only 3 percent of researchers under the age of 36 won grants, compared
with 18 percent in 1983.
In 2008, the most recent year for which data was available,
only 21 percent of basic biomedical PhDs had secured tenure or tenure track
academic jobs, even 6-10 years after receiving their doctorate, compared with
28 percent in 1993.
Daniels points to several factors forcing this trend. At the
top of the list is more than a decade of flat federal funding for the nation’s
biggest source of grant money, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It’s a
25 percent decline in real dollars, and with less money to spend, NIH is now
approving about half as many proposals as before.
The resulting competition for grants is a race that favors
older scientists. As Daniels describes, senior researchers often have an
“incumbency advantage” because they support applications with data acquired
from prior grants. In the NIH peer-review system, they are safer bets compared
to an unproven researcher.
Less federal funding also means financial pressure on
universities. What grants don’t cover, universities must. As NIH dollars have
decreased, the university share has been forced to compensate. Add the growing
cost of biomedical research and the start-up help traditionally given to new
researchers and universities are taking an even bigger hit.
In fact, according to the National Science Foundation,
universities now spend more than $12 billion of their own funds on research and
development, a figure that has more than doubled in the last 12 years. Of the
money allotted for R&D within my own institution, the University of
Minnesota, $175 million goes to financing research.
Universities cannot keep up with this ever-growing share of
the funding pie. Less money means fewer and more competitive tenure-track
positions, another factor encouraging universities to opt for older scientists
with proven grant-winning track records.
Universities recognize the plight of young researchers and
are doing what they can to direct funding their way. In January, Johns Hopkins
announced $15 million in funding for two new award programs aimed at
early-career researchers. But, as Daniels stated during an appearance with
WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, it’s a drop in the bucket. With NIH supporting close
to $30 billion a year in grants, the solution has to be more federal funding.
“We are eating our seed corn,” American Society for Cell
Biology chief Stefano Bertuzzi told USA Today when interviewed about the plight
of young scientists. At the age that past scientists were doing Nobel
Prize-quality work in their own labs, today’s researchers are still
post-doctoral fellows. “This is fundamentally wrong.”