NIH
scientificactivist | September 12, 2007Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that the Senate will be voting on mandatory public access to NIH research later this month (on September 28, apparently). Such a bill has already passed the House (in July 2007). The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is urging citizens to contact their Senators in support of this legislation. Check out the site for more information and for Senator contact information.
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access offers these talking points:
American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by…
revere | August 21, 2007You wonder when they will ever learn -- or IF they will ever learn. In the wake of yesterday's announcement that the Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. David Schwartz, will step aside while NIH does an inquiry into allegations of turmoil at the institute and management irregularities, comes a letter sent to NIEHS employees -- and as far as we know only NIEHS employees -- asking for reporting of any contacts with Congress:
Employees of the National Institutes of Health in North Carolina are being asked to report all contacts with Congress - a request that…
revere | August 20, 2007In an email letter sent internally to all National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) personnel, its Director, Dr. David Schwartz, has announced he is temporarily stepping aside while the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, conducts an internal review of NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NATP), both of which have come under fire from congressional, internal and outside critics (see our posts, here, here and here). Here is the text of Dr. Schwartz's email, as we received it:
Dear Colleagues:
As you know, there have been recent inquiries by members of Congress and others…
mikethemadbiologist | August 20, 2007...to me. Or at least, to the residents of my congressional district. MoveOn.org has a district-by-district list of what your congressional district's contribution to the Iraqi War and Occupation could have bought instead. For me, a resident of Massachusetts' Eight District:
*The cost to Massachusetts taxpayers alone is $12.89 billion.
*Taxpayers in the 8th congressional district are paying $998 million for the Iraq war.
What Citizens of Massachusetts's 8th District Could Have Gotten Instead:
· Health care coverage for 290,837 people--or 363,877 kids, or
· Head Start for 118,751…
scientificactivist | July 20, 2007In my post earlier today, I stressed the need for the NIH to mandate open access to research publications supported by its funding:
As the largest supporter of biomedical research in the US, the NIH has a special obligation to make sure that its (taxpayer funded!) research is published in the public domain. Since May 2005, the NIH has had an optional open access program that revolves around PubMed Central. Specifically, the NIH "requests and strongly encourages all investigators to make their NIH-funded peer-reviewed, author's final manuscript available to other researchers and the public…
scientificactivist | July 20, 2007I've been tagged by Hope for Pandora (who was tagged by DrugMonkey, who was tagged by Writedit) in a blog meme regarding the NIH's request for feedback on its peer review system. I'm not huge into these blog memes, so I'm not going to pass this along to seven others, but I will share a few thoughts.
Being only in the second year of my Ph.D. (and studying overseas), I haven't applied for an NIH grant before, so I'm not intimately familiar with the NIH's peer review system and can't offer much in the way of constructive criticism there. I can, however, speak generally about some of the major…
mikethemadbiologist | June 4, 2007I was watching this video of a presentation by ScienceBlogling Matt Nisbet, and he related this factoid about the NIH and scientific illiteracy:
Only nine percent of Americans could identify what the NIH was.
(on the video, it's at the 27:00 mark)
Given the public's staggering ignorance, it's a miracle any science gets done. How can people not know that the NIH stands for the National Institute of Holiness?
Kidding.
revere | April 27, 2007I will admit to having a soft spot in my heart for one of the NIH institutes, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. NIEHS is on a separate campus in Research Triangle Park, NC, away from the main NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. It is separated in other ways, too, having a decidedly more public health focus than the other institutes. Its mission, like other NIH institutes, is to ferret out the basic causes of illness, in NIEHS's case, environmentally caused or influenced illness. Its interest in cancer caused by industrial chemicals, asthma from air pollution, reproductive and…
revere | April 11, 2007A political pundit recently likened the Bush administration to the refrigerator that was never cleaned under the Republican rubber stamp congress. Now that new housekeepers have moved in they are finding lots of gross and moldy half eaten meals in the back. The latest to stink the place up is Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the most public health oriented of all the NIH institutes. Or it used to be, as we noted in an earlier post. Under Director David Schwartz it was on its way to being the kind of harmless agency most congenial to the Bush…
revere | March 6, 2007The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is the only one of the NIH institutes whose mission clearly has public health at its core. At least it was the only one. Now there are none, thanks to the narrow vision and autocratic management of its Bush appointed Director, Dr. David Schwartz. In the two years he has been at the helm we have seen morale plummet, emphasis change from public health and toward clinical medicine and a variety of scandals plague what was once the proudest and most public spirited member of the NIH family.
Schwartz, like other Bush appointees, has a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 7, 2007How does the entire NIH go offline? I realize it's free, but every so often, it just is inaccessible for hours at a time, particularly on weekends. Don't they know that science never rests...
scientificactivist | November 20, 2006Since we had an interesting discussion here back in September about the rapid decline in success rates of NIH R01 grants, I should point readers over to Effect Measure for some informed commentary on a recent article in Science (subscription required) from NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni. The success rate of Type-1 grants, for example, fell by more than one half from 2000 to 2005, a bad sign coming from the nation's flagship biomedical research grant program. Certainly, then, Zerhouni has some 'splainin' to do. I'll defer to Effect Measure, though, to summarize and comment on Zerhouni's…
revere | November 20, 2006In the late 1990s congress decided to invest in our future by doubling the NIH budget. If you are a scientist today trying to get an NIH grant, however, you are in tough shape. Success rates are falling like a stone, with less than 20% of grant applications now being funded. It is common to submit a proposal several times before finally getting a grant or giving up and moving on. What happened?
A lot of scientists want to know that and it prompted NIH Director Elias Zerhouni to try and explain in in the latest issue of Science magazine, the country's premier science journal. The opening…
revere | November 14, 2006Today I got several emails, each asking for my views on a proposed change to the format for National Institutes of Health grant proposals. This may seem of only parochial interest except to those of us who make our living applying for NIH grants, but how health research is funded is of interest to the public in general so here's some background.
The NIH grant review process is one of the most admired in the world and a strong argument can be made it is responsible for the high quality of NIH supported science. I'll deal here with only the most important of the grant mechanisms at NIH, the so-…
scientificactivist | September 13, 2006Since I reported yesterday on a letter in Science describing the current decline in funding of NIH (National Institutes of Health) R01 grants, several others have chimed in as well. PZ Myers of Pharyngula gave the post a mention, and Mike the Mad Biologist as well as Orac of Respectful Insolence gave their own detailed commentary.
Here's what Mike had to say:
For faculty, many of whom have guaranteed salaries if they are tenure-track or tenured, this is an inconvience. For those whose salaries are dependent on this funding, this is far, far worse.
In the medium term, this is really going to…
scientificactivist | September 12, 2006In a letter in last week's issue of Science (subscription required), two scientists from the National Caucus of Basic Biomedical Science Chairs--H. George Mandel and Elliot S. Vesell--describe in detail the funding crisis currently plaguing American scientists. The authors demonstrate a shocking decrease over the last seven years in the allocation of NIH (National Institutes of Health) R01 grants, the nation's keystone funding program for supporting biomedical science.
Here's the data:
Fate of unamended (unsolicited) R01 research grant applications
Fiscal year
Number submitted
Number awarded…