Funding
mikethemadbiologist | January 26, 2009According to the text of HR1 (pdf), NSF will be getting an additional $2.5 billion as part of the 'stimulus'* package. From HR1 (pp. 54-55):
For an additional amount for ''Research and Related Activities'', $2,500,000,000: Provided, That $300,000,000 shall be available solely for the Major Research Instrumentation program and $200,000,000 shall be for activities authorized by title II of Public Law 100-570 for academic research facilities modernization: Provided, That for peer-reviewed grants made under this heading, the time limitation provided in section 1103(b) of this Act shall be 120…
purepedantry | January 22, 2009Health-infrastructure, information technology, and science research spending are clearly related to the success of our economy. They represent investments into intellectual property and human capital that increase productivity and create long-term growth. For this reason, I don't object to the government spending money on them as a matter of policy.
But Gary Becker makes an interesting point with respect to the economic stimulus package. While such spending may be important for long-term growth, it's effectiveness as a short-term growth measure may be limited:
The stimulus package's plans…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2009I'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…
purepedantry | January 16, 2009People expressed a healthy skepticism to my assertion that money for science in the economic stimulus package is not the best way to fund science and may do more harm than good. One of my assumptions in that argument was that this funding would be short-term and not followed through with further increases.
Nature has more on the stimulus package suggesting that it may be more long-term:
Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities (AAU) in Washington DC, said the bill represents a solid endorsement of the scientific community's argument that investing in research and…
purepedantry | January 15, 2009So I have been reading over the details of the stimulus bill that is working its way through Congress. Now I grant that this is a rough draft and may be substantially modified in the process of passage, but one particular sentence got me thinking:
Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: We need to put scientists to work looking for the next great discovery, creating jobs in cutting-edge-technologies, and making smart investments that will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy. For every dollar invested in broadband the economy sees a ten-fold return on…
mikethemadbiologist | January 9, 2009In 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…
mikethemadbiologist | November 14, 2008Not that this is a real concern of mine, but something Kos wrote a while ago about the possibility of Huckabee becoming the RNC party chairman interested me:
But if Huckabee has the ground troops, what is he missing? The money. He got far in his primary race without any, winning Iowa with something like $27. But he won't be able to rebuild his party on shoe leather alone.
Us Demcoratic rebels bypassed the Terry McAuliffe wing of our party by building our own alternate small-dollar fundraising mechanism. Without that cash, Dean would've never existed, and the establishment's favorite candidate…
mikethemadbiologist | November 4, 2008Over 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…
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2008First, 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…
mikethemadbiologist | October 25, 2008...it's applied research. As far as I can tell, the McCain campaign is referring to a study of olive fruit flies which are an agricultural pest. From the congressman who wrote the earmark:
"The Olive Fruit Fly has infested thousands of California olive groves and is the single largest threat to the U.S. olive and olive oil industries," he said. "I secured $748,000 for olive fruit fly research and irradiation in the (fiscal year 2008) appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA will use some of that funding for their research facility in France. This USDA research…
mikethemadbiologist | October 21, 2008More 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…
purepedantry | October 14, 2008Many scientifically-inclined voters were a bit shocked by McCain's comment criticizing Obama for supporting a "3 million dollar earmark for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago." The "overhead projector" in question was actually a top of the line piece of equipment for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and many did not consider this an earmark.
University of Chicago professor, Andrey Kravstov, responded in a comment on the NYTimes website (Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance):
The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned…
mikethemadbiologist | September 22, 2008Before I get to the letter I sent to my Congressional delegation, I want to discuss why the proposed bailout matters if you consider yourself a friend of science.
It's very simple: if we sink $700 billion or more into propping up brokers you can kiss any science-related initiatives goodbye. No increases in certain basic research areas. No increases for public health. No research and development of green technologies. None of the things that a bunch of ScienceBloglings are talking about here. Instead, it all disappears down the porcelain crapper.
There is no science fairy: the most…
mikethemadbiologist | September 15, 2008One of the most important things in public health is surveillance. While it's not sexy, you can't solve health problems if you don't have good data. Recently, many professional societies sent a joint letter to several representatives asking their support for the National Integrated Public Health Surveillance Systems and Reportable Conditions Act which will be submitted to committee (the full text of the letter is at the end of the post).
The primary goal of the NIPHSSRCA (try saying that ten times fast....) is to modernize our surveillance infrastructure. When I would argue for electronic…
mikethemadbiologist | August 19, 2008Republican John McCain has repeatedly portrayed a study that uses bear DNA to estimate the population size of potentially endangered bears as an example of government waste and pork barrel spending. There's one small problem, however.
McCain was for it before he was against it (italics mine):
While he tried to cut money for several other projects in the same bill, he never proposed cutting the bear study and voted for the final bill containing it....
The ad goes on to criticize an earmark that provided "$3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana." This is not the first time McCain has…
purepedantry | August 11, 2008Michael S. Teitelbaum has an editorial in Science about scientific funding that echoes a point that I have been making for a while: the issue with scientific funding is as much about volatility (bigs ups and downs) as it is total funding.
For NIH, more research funding does produce increased research output, as intended. Yet, because the system as currently structured employs graduate and postdoctoral research assistants to do much of the laboratory work, increased research funding also produces (after a multiyear lag) additional Ph.D.-level applicants for NIH grants. No effective mechanisms…
mikethemadbiologist | July 28, 2008Who 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…
purepedantry | June 9, 2008NIH has agreed to some suggestions from advisory panels about how to change the grant peer review process:
One year ago, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni asked external and internal advisory panels for advice on how to cope with a record number of applications, a flat NIH budget, and a shortage of quality reviewers. The two panels issued recommendations this winter (Science, 29 February, p. 1169). NIH's response was presented today to the Advisory Committee to the Director by National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research Director Lawrence Tabak.
NIH agreed with the panels on the need to…
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2008In the midst of every bout of interest in healthcare, there's always mention of primary care physicians who serve as 'gatekeepers' of healthcare. While it makes sense, there's one catch--you have to have enough primary care physicians:
But there's one important ingredient missing from that equation -- enough primary care doctors to take care of all these newly insured people. And the big reason behind the lack of primary care docs is the fact they get paid shit -- relatively speaking. Unlike the rest of the civilized world, physicians in the US are rarely salaried employees. With rare…
mikethemadbiologist | May 28, 2008So argues a recent commentary in Science:
The pursuit of novel scientific interventions for AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis has been supported for decades by the traditional public-sector research funding bodies, such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.K. Medical Research Council, the Agence nationale de recherches sur le sida, and the European and Developing Country Trial Partnership, with additional contributions from the private sector and charitable bodies. These major public-sector funding bodies are located in developed countries and, although the situation is changing,…