Fast track, derailed?
Paul Smaglik
Wednesday, 12 March 2008 20:09 UTC
Taking longer in grad school.
Having multiple postdocs.
Waiting for independent-investigator status.
Naturejobs diagnosed these symptoms four years ago and prescribed some solutions. But we’re seeing signs that the maladies hampering young scientists’ career progression might be getting worse. One underlying cause? The US National Institutes of Health has caught the budget-crunch bug since then. Funding has been flat the past five years. This chronic condition hits young scientists hardest. Over that time, new faculty have seen their grant success rates drops and the age to independence increase. Grant renewals have also been harder to come by over that time period—especially for younger faculty. Now the NIH has frozen postdoc stipend levels; for fellows, this is like coming down with a stomach flu when they already have a cold. I’m loathe to just point out a problem, without pointing to any solution. But I’d like to hear the health of your career at this stage. Is your career feeling under the funding weather? Or are you budgetarily healthy? Please let us know. And I’ll soon follow up with some bright spots and ways to boost your career’s immune system.
Updated 12 March 2008 21:41 UTC
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T.S. Elliot called April “the cruelest month” in his classic poem ‘The Waste Land’
But March 2008 was full of harsh foreboding—especially for young scientists striving for independent-research status. I wrote a Prospect
about how success rates for US National Institutes of Health R01 grants fell from 26% in 2000 to 19% in 2007. Meanwhile, the average age of a first-time R01 climbed from the mid-30s in 1980 to a high of 42 now. Then, Nature investigated the phenomenon of ‘grandee grantees’—a pool of 200 established investigators who were supported by six or more grants each. Naturejobs followed that up with a Prospect pondering whether NIH should share the wealth (or the shortage of wealth, since the agency’s budget has been relatively flat the past several years) or continue on the same course. Funneling more money exclusively to young investigators runs the risk of being labeled “need-based” funding rather than the tradition of “merit-based”. That argument has some traction. While covering NIH policy, I’ve heard several members of Congress ask for more money for research in their states—even though they haven’t mustered the research firepower of say, California or Boston; that argument always made me uncomfortable; I believe a fair peer-review grant system is the best way to distirbute funds to themost deserving science. Having said that, one must wonder how some senior investigators are six, or ten or 22 times more deserving of merit than promising young investigators. Without their own R01s, these investigators face either perpetual postdocs or the prospect of running underfunded labs—which makes it that much harder for them to generate the data they need to finally bag an R-01. I’m not sure what the solution is—or the extent of the problem, as seen by the young investigators. Please let me know if you are the victim of what appears to be an imbalance in the system—or if you have suggestions on how to either fix it (beyond an unprecedented NIH budgetary boost) or deal with it.
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