The US National Institutes of Health’s budget doubled between 1998 and 2003. But in the aftermath, grants and are harder to come by, and job prospects for recent PhDs and current postdocs are uncertain.

Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, says the problem is structural—that funding year-to-year is uncertain and that proportional money doesn’t always go to training when the amount of grants available increase. Two things can change this, Teitelbaum writes in Science. First, steady increases above inflation—ideally about 6 percent a year, would help eliminate one of the worst side effects of the last NIH windfall; many new grants got funded, but once the doubling stopped, the NIH had a hard time paying for post-doubling grants, because it got strapped paying for multi-year grants already in effect. A slow, steady increase in the NIH budget would be better for researchers than a few years of 15 percent hikes, followed by the flat line of the past several years.

Next, the NIH funding structure needs to take into account its goal of training young scientists, by setting aside money every year, outside its R01 scheme and considering long-term career goals of NIH funding. Here are a few specific s from Teitelbaum:

• Support more postdoc and PhDs under training grants, rather than under a PI’s R01.
• Give more information about the US science market and funding success to both domestic and foreign scientists.
• Pay for non-tenure-track career research positions, like research assistants, staff scientists and support separately, rather than paying students or temporary staff from R01s.

These changes may just bring about some stability—and sanity—to long-term career prospects. Please let me know if you agree, disagree, or have other alternatives.