By Elizabeth Little, PhD, PDA Public Affairs Committee
Individual investigator awards are believed to promote creativity by offering long-term funding for established and successful scientists. However, decreasing support for traditional grant proposals may concern early career researchers.
Following the leads of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)
and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the NIH is
encouraging each of its institutes to initiate funding “person” awards similar
to those offered by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) rather than the
traditional project-based grant. The most advanced proposal so far is the NCI’s
Outstanding Investigator Award, a 7-year-long grant (with a possible 3-year
renewal) offering $600,000 in direct costs each year. It’s estimated that Outstanding
Investigator Awards will take up approximately 15% of the total NCI grant
budget. The debate between investigator awards and project proposals lies in
how the new proposals will particularly affect young investigators.
The benefit of person awards is that they offer funding
without stipulations, allowing for increased creativity in designing and
implementing projects. With a relatively large amount of money per year and
more long-term funding, scientists can pause from grant-writing and focus on research.
Furthermore, studies comparing the NIH Pioneer awards (another
investigator-based award) to traditional RO1 project grants has shown that
Pioneer awards publish more papers overall (although papers/grant-dollar are
comparable) and publish more innovative studies in more highly ranked
journals.
On one hand, the “fund people, not projects” theory seems
like an excellent plan to finance the nation’s scientific studies. After all, these
investigators have already demonstrated their ability to produce good work
through peer-reviewed publications. However, while people awards are intended
to reward productivity for established researchers, they will take money away
from the pool available to more obscure or beginning investigators. As it is,
the NIH research project grant review committees already consider the principal
investigator’s publication record, and previously successful scientists are
more likely to maintain well-funded labs. Even if younger investigators are evaluated
by different criteria from their more-established colleagues, their
productivity will be largely assessed based on publication records as graduate
students or postdocs, which may or may not be indicative of their abilities as
independent scientists.
The individual investigator model will only allow for a
select few to receive the awards. NCI estimates that fewer than 50 Outstanding
Investigator Awards will be given a year. No doubt this is partly because the
NIH does not want to entirely abolish its project-based proposals. While
open-ended investigator awards have been highly successful for some groups such
as HHMI, other institutions like the Wellcome Trust are planning to restructure
their people awards to create more funding prospects for younger
researchers.
Overall, by freeing investigators from constant grant
writing, longer-term funding would help boost creativity and scientific
progress. Rewarding these grants to proven scientists with superb track records
seems like an obvious choice. However, given the current funding situation, now
is not the time to test out these theories. Right now, we need to be more
concerned about young, promising researchers turning away from the field
because of a lack of opportunity. A 15%
decrease in available funding would further hurt our scientific future and, by
shutting out new researchers, lead to increased “graying” of investigators and
a loss of smart and driven students who see a better future outside of the
laboratory. We need to focus on encouraging new, developing labs because,
inevitably, that is the long-term future of science; new investigators are
vital for increasing scientific creativity and for maintaining the lifeblood of
research for future generations. While the current NIH review process is by no
means perfect, it seems easier to evaluate project proposals rather than
investigator promise. Certainly, established and successful researchers are
already favored in this process. It may be difficult to improve a system that
already evaluates both the investigator and the proposed research, though research-based
proposals tend to rely on less innovative projects. Rather than focus on
long-term grants so that a few investigators can reduce grant writing time, we
need to streamline the grant process and increase funding so that more
scientists can support labs by actually winning grants and not just writing
them. This year, the NIH allowed grant applicants with unsuccessful A1 grant
resubmissions to apply the same ideas as a new A0 grant, hoping to “encourage applicants to refine and strengthen all application
submissions”. This is the sort of streamlined process that will allow
scientists, particularly new investigators, to hone their grant skills and
focus their projects for improved lab funding at this difficult financial time.
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