While the recent deluge of stimulus money to fund science research is very welcome, the chief of the National Institutes of Health said on Monday, the devil is in the details—will the support continue?
“Science is not a 100-yard dash—it’s a marathon,” said Francis Collins during an address at Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago. Collins is the first sitting NIH chief director to speak at the annual meeting; his talk attracted several thousand of the more than 30,000 neuroscientists and others who have converged on McCormick Place this week.
There could not be a more important time to reinforce the importance of science than now, as the president and Congress begin the difficult debate over the next fiscal budget, Collins argued. Most experiments started now won’t be completed in the two years covered by the stimulus grants, he pointed out. They “are down payments on results in the future,” and “to take away the fuel midstream would not lead to good outcomes” for the research or the researchers, he said. “Science doesn’t resonate very well with feast-or-famine circumstances."
In the past year, the agency received around 20,000 applications for stimulus challenge grant funding; it had expected several thousand. “We weren’t able to fund but a percentage,” Collins said, “but were inspired by the outpouring of creativity.”
Continued funding in 2011 and after will be its own challenge given the economic downturn, however, and the agency could again find itself in the all-then-nothing cycle it suffered this past decade. Funding doubled between 1998 and 2003 and then was flat for the next five years, letting inflation carve “a deep loss” in money available for grants, he said.
After just receiving $10 billion in stimulus funding for the 2008-2009 budget, funding more 12,000 research projects, “I do think there’s some risk” that the cycle will repeat, Collins said. He urged scientists and science advocates to “make the case that science research really is important to the nation’s health, its economy and to the rest of the world’s health.”
With its current funding, Collins said, NIH is supporting its bedrock, basic science research, but he also is looking to take advantage of five “areas of opportunity”:
- Applying “high-throughput technology,” such as imaging, genomics,
computational methods and nanotechnology, to answer basic questions. Instead of small projects teasing out one or
another component of a biological system, “we want investigators to be able to
ask questions with ‘all’ in them,” Collins said, for instance, "what are all
the variations in the genome linked to a certain disease?" Researchers
didn’t have the tools earlier to ask these wide-ranging questions; now that
they do, he said, NIH should encourage them to take advantage.
- Encouraging research translating bench research to potential
therapies for people. Translating
a basic-research discovery into a clinical application is a long and complicated process
that used to be mainly funded by private pharmaceutical firms. Collins said NIH will
target money for more investigators to tackle the climb toward clinical
applications, including the “so-called valley of death,” or first-stage
trials in humans, a traditionally difficult stage to get funded.
- Contributing to the science of health care reform. The institute will continue to offer
policymakers and the public health information that is based on evidence,
including research that compares the effectiveness of current therapies. “NIH
has been doing these studies for a long time,” Collins said, including reports
on treatments for diabetes and schizophrenia.
- Encouraging a greater focus on global health. “We’re taking the mandate to use soft power
instead of hard power and applying it to scientific research,” he said. For
example, he cited a cooperative project by the University of Virginia and
Brazil researching the effects of childhood nutrition and cognitive
development.
- Reinvigorating and empowering the biomedical research community. By stimulating innovation and supporting young
investigators, Collins said, the U.S. can retain the bright young and
mid-career scientists who might not otherwise stay in the field. “We know there
is great interest and pent-up capability,” he said. Yet with funds threatening
to dry up in two years, those people may start wondering if they made the right
career choice and be tempted to abandon research.
Collins also separately met with groups of postdoctoral students, with reporters and with the board of the neuroscience society. “We are listening,” he said, urging people to e-mail NIH-LISTENS@nih.gov with questions, critiques and suggestions. “We are at a very exciting time scientifically,” he said, and “neuroscience is one of the areas of greatest excitement in science.
“Clearly, our community, after five years of flat budgets, came back to life with this opportunity provided by the recovery act, and put forth some bold and brilliant new ideas.”
-Nicky Penttila
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