Originally published on January 26, 2015
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The biomedical research we rely on for advances in medicine,
whether it be vaccines or cures for life-threatening disease, depends upon
sufficient funding. Without resources, scientists cannot establish and run
sophisticated labs and they cannot pay the salaries of the post-doctoral
fellows and essential staff the play key roles in conducting research.
Most of the money for scientific research comes from federal
funding sources such as the National Institutes of Health. It is a point of
pride that federal grants are bestowed upon the nation’s best and brightest,
those showing the greatest promise of innovation and discovery.
But when this crucial funding arrives, it comes with strings
attached. Researchers may win it, but the federal government requires
universities share the cost of conducting research. They are called on to
defray the expenses of salaries and benefits, administrative costs,
infrastructure and supplies.
Unfortunately, this cost-sharing arrangement has fallen
woefully out of balance. While the costs of conducting research have increased
over time, the federal government has, in real terms, significantly reduced its
contribution. And it is the universities who must make up the shortfall.
In a recent article for the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Ronald J. Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University, lays out the facts.
Citing data from the National Science Foundation, he notes
that U.S. universities now spend more than $12 billion of their own funds in
support of research and development, an amount that has doubled in the last 12
years. In fact, their share of the support for research rose from 8.7 percent
in 1962 to 19.4 percent in 2012.
He describes a number of reasons for the increase. The first
is a product of the advancement of science: the cost for instrumentation needed
for today’s highly specialized and sophisticated research labs has increased
significantly.
However, his other reasons relate directly to the fact that
the federal government is shrinking its commitment to research. As noted in
earlier posts, federal research funds available through the NIH have declined
by 25 percent in real dollars over the last decade. This has translated into a
smaller percentage of grants being approved for NIH funding and therefore
researchers face greater competition for funds. Only 17 percent of grant
applications were accepted for NIH funding last year, as compared to 30 percent
in 2003. As Daniels points out, it is the universities who fund the research
during the time it takes applicants to win their own grants.
Add to this the fact that the federal government has capped
reimbursements for administrative costs at the same level for more than 20
years and lowered the cap on salary recovery. Coupled with an increasingly
expensive regulatory burden and, in real terms, the university share gets even
bigger.
And yet, as Daniels notes, this squeeze comes at a time when
centers for biomedical research are operating under greater financial
pressures, including tighter margins, losses in clinical revenues and
unpredictable funding from all sources.
The University of Minnesota, where I work, is anything but
immune. The university’s total R&D expenditures for all campuses is $882
million. Of these expenditures, a growing and significant portion is the
institution’s $175 million investment of its own funds to finance research.
This trajectory of institutional support of research is unsustainable. Put
another way, something has to give.
The great concern is that it will be the quality of the
research conducted at our elite centers of learning.
“With so much of the federal research investment taking the
form of grants to individuals,” Daniels notes, “cash-strapped universities
might be led to make choices that are short of ideal for science policy or the
biomedical workforce. For instance, over time, universities could shy away from
the recruitment of unproven scientists who lack their own funding streams,
opting instead for established investigators who have shown that they can
attract more consistent support.”
Every great scientist was, at one point, unproven. The
question we face today is how many will stay that way due to this untenable
state of affairs.