NIH

I've been terribly behind on a billion things lately, most importantly spending time with my family and calling PharmSis and PharmMom. However, DrugMonkey's post on Mentoring 101: Let's Talk About the Money drew from me a comment I feel I should post here despite coming after 60+ other comments there. The bulk of the discussion was on 1) what do you do to educate your lab on the actual budget of running the show, 2) do NIH research grants really support graduate and postgraduate education? and 3) does recovery of indirect costs (ICRs) represent a boondoggle for university administration, an…
I've been looking at the Recovery Bill working its way through the House Appropriations Committee, and, regarding NIH funding, I have a lot of the same doubts that ScienceBlogling Jake does. I'm concerned that it spends too much money building capacity without any commitment to provide research funds to use that equipment. One of the very good things this bill would do is to provide much-needed repairs and upgrades to existing federal research facilities. But the bill also provides for improve non-federal research facilities (p. 138): For an additional amount for ''National Center for…
In an excellent review blasting the false dichotomy of more versus less regulation (for additional commentary, see Amanda and Ezra Klein), economist Dean Baker proposes that the government get into the drug development business directly: ...the government could pay for the research upfront and make all research findings and patents fully public. It already spends $30 billion a year financing biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, an amount almost as high as the pharmaceutical industry claims to spend on its research. NIH research is highly respected, with almost all…
Environmental health researchers got some good news yesterday. The NIH's only institute that focusses almost entirely on public health and environmental science, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), got a new Director after years of chaotic and controversial regime of former Director David Schwartz, who left under a cloud of alleged conflicts of interest and mismanagement. For the last year NIEHS has been under very capable and stabilizing direction of an Acting Director, Sam Wilson, but there were limits on what could be done by a Director and his Deputy who didn…
My Scibling Mark H. over at the Denialism blog has reproduced an internal NIH memo that is something to behold: If you aren't used to the conventions of scientific collegiality you might not realize at first the unbelievable stupidity of this. A visiting international scientist (a Canadian or someone from Latin America, a European, often an Asian or African visitor) can't get a snack or go outside for a smoke unless someone goes with them. Or to the bathroom. If your visitor is a member of the opposite sex you'll have to find someone to go into the restrooms with them. And the computer part…
Over at DrugMonkey, ScienceBlogling PhysioProf comments on the lower funding rates for R03 (Small Grants) and R21 (Exploratory/Developmental Research Grants) NIH grants: What the fuck is the deal with using the traditional study section peer review mechanism for piddly ass little chunks of change like R03s and R21s?? What a massive waste of reviewer and administrative time and effort to use study section panels to review these punky little turds. NIH program should make funding decisions on these things administratively using the same system as NSF uses for many of its grants. Two or three…
First, thanks to everyone who commented. I think DrugMonkey hit the nail on the head: Nevertheless, MtM seems to be calling for a greater proportion of grants to be funded through the Request for Applications mechanism. The key parts of the RFA which distinguish it from the Program Announcement is that the RFA is usually a closely described set of scientific goals, has a single nonstandard receipt deadline and supposedly has a commitment to fund a minimum number of proposals. I say "supposedly" because I am familiar with one case in which no funded grants resulted from an RFA call. I should…
More specifically, I think more of the NIH budget needs to be much more focused and targeted, and less researcher driven. In a post about NIH proposal revisions (i.e., resubmissions after a proposal has been rejected and critiqued), ScienceBlogling DrugMonkey writes (italics original): The reason is that this policy does nothing about the tendency of reviewers to focus on grantsmanship issues as an easy triage mechanism, instead of taking the "fish or cut bait" hard look at the genuinely new application the first time. The primary stage of review is the main driver here. The ameliorative…
Like a lot of other research scientists supported by NIH I got an email yesterday from NIH Director Elias Zerhouni announcing his intention to leave his position "to devote much of my attention to writing." At least it wasn't the hackneyed "to spend more time with my family." While Zerhouni won't actually leave until the end of next month, the federal health research establishment is essentially leaderless, awaiting the next administration. The main public health institute within the NIH system, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has been under "Acting" (although…
Earlier today, Elias Zerhouni--who has been the director of the NIH since 2002--announced that he will resign at the end of this October. According to the NIH press release, he is stepping down "to pursue writing projects and explore other professional opportunities." The Hill has more from Zerhouni about his resignation: "I felt it would be in the best interests of the NIH for me to leave before the election," Zerhouni said. With a vacancy in the directorship, he explained, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) wins the presidential election in November, he would be…
Governmental funding of science is fundamentally important to our economic future. First let's look at funding for the National Institutes of Health, the main source of money for biomedical research in the US: Joseph j7uy5 @ Corpus Callosum points out: I can't help but notice that the funding leveled off the same year that the Iraq War started. How about the Physical Sciences, Engineering, Math & Computer Sciences? They have all flat-lined since GWB came to power: On the biggest issues of our time, energy, the story is no better. Money for alternative energy research has been flat…
Who woulda thunk it? A recent paper in PLoS One argues that the NIH review process uses far too few reviewers to claim the level of scoring precision that the NIH provides. NIH grants are scored on a scale from 1.0 to 5.0, with 1.0 being the best; reviewers can grade in tenths of a point (i.e., 1.1, 2.3, etc.). The authors, using some very straightforward statistics, demonstrate that four reviewers could accurately assign whole integer scores (1, 2, 3...), but to obtain reliable scores with a precision of 0.01, a proposal would require 38,416 reviewers. Not going to happen. Keep in mind…
Most academic scientists -- including me and my colleagues -- don't want unnecessary federal interference with what we do. We're like any regulated community. Not happy to be regulated. Unfortunately we have made the unnecessary necessary by allowing improper conflicts of interest to infest academic medicine and predictably, Congress is about to step in. Until now, the academic response to periodic external scrutiny of potential research conflicts has been increasingly to assert that it can police itself. In 2001, the Association of American Medical Colleges issued recommendations for strong…
We seem to be doing a lot of vaccination stuff here lately. It's an obvious public health topic, one that's in the news and (in some quarters) considered controversial. I'm a strong proponent of vaccination where it makes sense (which is in most of the instances where it is used) but that doesn't mean I think it is problem free. For a public health scientist the problems are not only interesting but of practical import. Yesterday's post about fainting during vaccinations produced an unexpected comment thread from people who have at one time or another fainted during a vaccination or medical…
A recent article by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) staff emphasized that NIAID funds over $800 million annually to study antimicrobial resistance. I've heard this same argument many times, and, every time, people always grumble about how that money includes all microorganisms, as opposed to bacterial antibiotic resistance (NIAID never breaks the money down by organism). In particular, the ESKAPE organisms (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumanni, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species), most of which…
Last week, I attended a talk by Alan Krensky, who is the Director of the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives (OPASI). First, OPASI is a superb acronym (Krensky has OPASI--it works better if you actually say it). One of OPASI's tasks is to oversee the NIH Roadmap and other cross-institute initiatives (more about that in a bit). The other priority is to assess how effective various programs are and to use this information to determine what future priorities should be. That sounds dry, but re-read that sentence: when Krensky speaks, you should listen. Much of his…
In keeping with the Broken Pipeline theme (see ScienceBloglings Greg, Coturnix, and Drug Monkey), this letter to Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) from the Coalition for the Life Sciences about his efforts to shift more funding to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs seems timely (italics mine): I am writing on behalf of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy (JSC) to express our concerns regarding S. 1932 and its intent to double the percentage of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget earmarked for the Small Business…
Late yesterday afternoon, a Friday and classic time to release news you don't want anyone to read, I got the following email [excerpted] from David Schwartz, on leave as Director of the National Institute of Health Sciences (NIEHS), the main public health-oriented NIH institute and the subject of several previous posts (here, here, here, here, here): Dear friends and colleagues, I have decided to resign as director of the NIEHS and NTP, effective immediately. My reasons for this decision are simple. I believe that our institute would be more successful with new leadership, and that I would…
After our recent rant on the necessity of supporting the public health and social services infrastructure instead of cutting taxes, President Bush has replied. He is cutting the infrastructure: President Bush's $3 trillion budget for next year slashes mental health funding and rural health care and freezes spending on medical research, among the cuts outlined in budget documents obtained by The Associated Press. The budget for the Department of Health and Human Services would be reduced by almost 3 percent under the Bush budget plan to be released Monday. The $2 billion in HHS cuts are about…
Bush and the Democratic Congress are still battling over the budget, although it is said they are getting closer. Getting closer to Bush unfortunately means giving him all the bombs and bullets he wants but not much else. A case in point is the latest proposal for the NIH and CDC budgets: Over the weekend, Congress prepared a new version of appropriations following President George Bush's veto of previous bill in November. This new bill includes $760 million less for NIH and $240 million less for CDC than the vetoed bill, according to news reports today. The result is an increase of less…