US Stands To Lose A Generation Of Young Researchers
ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2008) - Five consecutive years of flat funding the 
budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is deterring promising 
young researchers and threatening the future of Americans' health, a group 
of seven preeminent academic research institutions have warned. In a new 
report released here, the group of concerned institutions (six research 
universities and a major teaching hospital) described the toll that 
cumulative stagnant NIH funding is taking on the American medical research 
enterprise. And the leading institutions warned that if NIH does not get 
consistent and robust support in the future, the nation will lose a 
generation of young investigators to other careers and other countries and, 
with them, a generation of promising research that could cure disease for 
millions for whom no cure currently exists.
The report, "A Broken Pipeline" Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of 
Science at Risk," was co-authored by Brown University, Duke University, 
Harvard University, The Ohio State University, Partners Healthcare, the 
University of California Los Angeles, and Vanderbilt University.
It profiles 12 junior researchers from institutions across the country who, 
despite their exceptional qualifications and noteworthy research, attest to 
the funding difficulties that they and their professional peers are 
experiencing. These researchers are devising new ways to manipulate stem 
cells to repair the heart, revealing critical pathways involved in cancer 
and brain diseases, and using new technologies to diagnose and treat kidney 
disease.
The 20-page report follows up on a related report released by a group of 
academic institutions in March 2007 "Within Our Grasp--Or Slipping Away" 
Assuring a New Era of Scientific and Medical Progress." That report, issued 
by a similar group of nine institutions across the country, showed how 
stagnant NIH funding was slowing discovery and squandering the significant 
opportunities for breakthroughs that past investment has put within reach.
"This is a real problem, discussed at almost every meeting one attends on 
campus, that can't be simply dismissed," said Drew Faust, Ph.D., President 
of Harvard University. "This is about the investment that America is -- or 
is not -- making in the health of its citizens and its economy. Right now, 
the nation's brightest, young researchers, upon whom the future of American 
medicine rests, are getting the message that biomedical research may be a 
dead end and they should explore other career options --and in too many 
cases, they're taking that message to heart. The President's latest budget 
proposal that calls for another year without an increase will only make the 
problem worse."
The "Broken Pipeline" report focuses on the effect that recurring flat 
funding is having on young researchers in particular. Junior 
researchers--typically assistant and associate professors who are trying to 
establish their own research laboratories--are getting a much smaller piece 
of the NIH funding pie to conduct their medical investigations, the report 
says. However, competition for limited resources is affecting scientists at 
every point of the academic research pipeline.
Between 1998 and 2003, the Clinton and Bush Administrations and Congress 
doubled the budget of the NIH, an effort that, in many ways, transformed 
many fields of biomedical research. This happened through the completion of 
the human genome project, and the creation of powerful new tools that 
provide a window into biological systems unavailable in the past resulting 
in, among other things, breakthroughs in cancer diagnosis and treatment that 
have caused cancer rates to fall.
However, in 2003, the budget increases stopped and, since then, the NIH has 
experienced a 13-percent drop in real purchasing power. As a result, 
research progress has slowed, and leading researchers' new ideas for funding 
are stuck at a toll-gate that only allows one in ten grants to be funded 
upon first submission. Rejected grants, that must be revised and 
resubmitted, are clogging the system, creating a queue in which young 
researchers feel they are at the back of the pack and are much more worried 
about getting funded than in the past.
"There's been a lot of discussion in the last year about the negative impact 
of the tight NIH budget on senior researchers and their labs," said Robert 
Golden, M.D., Dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and 
Public Health. "But it appears that junior investigators may be having the 
toughest time in this fiscal climate. They're competing for funding with 
established researchers, who are their mentors, and finding that the 
financial support just isn't there, or that they can't afford to support 
themselves while writing and rewriting grant proposals."
"The feedback I received from one reviewer was that my ideas were 'very 
innovative and had the potential to make a big impact, but they were too 
risky,'" says Tricia Serio, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of 
Molecular, Cellular Biology, and Biochemistry, Brown University. "To succeed 
in reaching our goals, we need the freedom to try risky things, to develop 
new approaches and techniques." Dr. Serio's research is focused on 
progressive brain diseases, like Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and 
Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow). She was named one of America's top biomedical 
researchers by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2003.
Fewer resources means that NIH is experiencing a backlog in high-quality 
research proposals, and too few are getting funded. In fact, the overall 
success rate for NIH research project grants dropped from 32 percent in 1999 
to 24 percent in 2007. Thus, only about one in four original research 
applications to the NIH is being funded, and many of those are only 
partially funded, and only after lengthy delays and cumbersome 
reapplications.
"Reviewers told us we have good data, a strong team, and well-thought-out 
experiments. We didn't get funded just because there were others going for 
their second and third round who were waiting in line," says Jill 
Rafael-Fortney, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular 
and Cellular Biochemistry at The Ohio State University, who is working on a 
new treatment for heart failure.
Highlights of how flat funding is affecting research:
In 1990, young researchers received 29 percent of R01 grants (the premier 
NIH research grant needed to establish a researcher's credibility and 
independence). By 2007, that dropped to 25 percent.
While the success rate has dropped for all R01 applicants, it is 
particularly low-- only 18 percent-- for first-time applicants.
First-time RO1 recipients also are older. The average age is now 43, up from 
39 years in 1990.
As a result, scientists who review NIH proposals have become more 
conservative when judging the merits of funding research projects. They are 
demanding more evidence of eventual success of proposed theories prior to 
approving funding and inadvertently changing the way science is being 
conducted, discouraging innovative, big ideas in favor of safer approaches 
for incremental progress to scientific discovery.
"With this tight funding situation, I've stepped away from the riskier 
stuff," says Pampee Young, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pathology, 
Vanderbilt University. "My salary and that of everyone in the lab is 
dependent on my getting grants. You become very savvy to what is fundable." 
Dr. Young's research is focused on using adult bone marrow stem cells to 
block the growth of tumors and to also repair damaged heart muscle.
Young investigator, Anil Potti, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine at 
Duke University says that the funding situation is hurting patients who are 
looking to research to help with their conditions. "I don't worry about the 
difficulty of getting funding from NIH for myself. I worry more about what 
it means in terms of patient care. The whole [grant] cycle can take 12-18 
months, and that's if you're successful on the first or second try. In the 
meantime, I'm seeing patients every day who could benefit from this 
research." The work of Dr. Potti and his colleagues involves new methods to 
diagnose and treat lung cancer and was named one of the top science stories 
of 2006 by Discover magazine.
Adapted from materials provided by Burness Communications, via EurekAlert!, 
a service of AAAS.

Rayilyn Brown
Board Member AZNPF
Arizona Chapter National Parkinson's Foundation
[log in to unmask] 

----------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn