Up To 1000 NIH Investigators Dropped Out Last Year 111
sciencehabit writes "New data show that after remaining more or less steady for a decade, the number of investigators with National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding dropped sharply last year by at least 500 researchers and as many as 1000. Although not a big surprise—it came the same year that NIH's budget took a 5% cut—the decline suggests that a long-anticipated contraction in the number of labs supported by NIH may have finally begun."
Out of ~22,000 (Score:5, Informative)
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Without something to anchor your 500-1000 number, who will know how outraged they need to be?
I agree! For example, is this Less Than, Greater Than, or Equal To deporting the finest Ice Hockey Player in all of Ecuador?
I can't bother to get worked up over something if it is just a "Best Ballerina on Bora Bora" level event...
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If you look at the chart at the link, it's 500-1000 out of 22000 or so -- 22000 is an all time high. So it's obviously the most outrageous outrage in history and we should all panic and wail and rend our clothes.
Meaningless without context (Score:5, Informative)
Without something to anchor your 500-1000 number, who will know how outraged they need to be?
And without knowing what those investigators were doing neither number is particularly useful. That's 1000 investigators and their entire lab staff most of them being scientists doing useful research not administrators etc. Unfortunately this doesn't just affect the current generation of scientists, it affects the next generation too. Not all of these labs will close, but there will certainly be a lot less capacity to take students and post docs. How this will impact research is pretty hard to predict, unfortunately it looks a bit more like the blunderbuss approach than the precision cull of the herd with a rifle and scope.
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Not all of these labs will close, but there will certainly be a lot less capacity to take students and post docs.
Fewer people will even make it that far when a line of research and certain fields get know to be shrinking. Current grad students, postdocs and young researchers will warn incoming people that things are getting harder and to go try other fields of research or lines of work. It is not like we lose the bottom part of the distribution and the best and brightest continue to do research, but people across the board get dissatisfied or view it as too risky and jump ship. I've watched friends and colleagues f
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Fewer people will even make it that far when a line of research and certain fields get know to be shrinking. Current grad students, postdocs and young researchers will warn incoming people that things are getting harder and to go try other fields of research or lines of work. It is not like we lose the bottom part of the distribution and the best and brightest continue to do research, but people across the board get dissatisfied or view it as too risky and jump ship.
Speaking as an academic, we've been telling prospective grad students that there are no academic jobs out there for 20 years. No one goes into academia because they think it's going to be a secure, well-paid job - they go into academia because they have a personal passion and curiosity for discovery and are often willing to make significant personal sacrifices to satisfy that passion. They'll take their PhD and 10 years of higher education to work 60 hour weeks as a postdoc for $40k (and think that's awes
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I would naively have expected that cuts to NIH programs would have low impact relative to programs funded by NASA and DoE. I don't have much knowledge of the NIH programs, but I feel like they are shorter term studies with less specialized infrastructure involved. So a 5% cut in funding there has closer to a 5% reduction in output. But DoE and NASA programs are often 10 to 20-year projects. If you cut funding one year (and they have cut funding 5-10% every year for a long time), you start cancelling program
The point isn't how many we're losing (Score:3)
Welcome to a third-rate USA (Score:2, Insightful)
Now that the anti-tax movement has won, we can look forward to the destruction of the greatest source of innovation the U.S. -- and the world -- has ever seen.
Get ready for the visionaries who tell us that the source of American innovation is guys working in garages, and all we have to do is lower taxes on garages to unleash the flow of productivity.
Re:Welcome to a third-rate USA (Score:5, Informative)
On which planet has the anti-tax movement won?
That would be this one [wikimedia.org].
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Re:Welcome to a third-rate USA (Score:5, Insightful)
The GDP is doing just fine as usual. If the people who actually did all the work got to see those gains, we might get somewhere.
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DINO (Score:2)
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You were doing fine for about one sentence. Then you got all partisan. Look at what the economy has done under the reps, look at what it's done under the dems, realize that most of the presidents who presided over a time of economic health were receiving a windfall that had nothing to do with their administration and little to do with the prior administration. For example, the economy surged under Clinton, but it was a bubble that would have happened no matter who was president.
I don't know if the libertari
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"You were doing fine for about one sentence. Then you got all partisan."
The WHOLE POINT is partisan. The comment I was replying to is partisan. The reality of our existence for the last 5 years or so has been very partisan.
"Look at what the economy has done under the reps, look at what it's done under the dems, realize that most of the presidents who presided over a time of economic health were receiving a windfall that had nothing to do with their administration and little to do with the prior administration. For example, the economy surged under Clinton, but it was a bubble that would have happened no matter who was president."
But that was then. Prior (recent) decades have very little to do with the current situation because of the 2008 disaster. It really does make a very big difference. The Democrats have been trying to use the same policies that failed during the Great Depression... as though they learned nothing from history over the last 80 years. (Which really isn't too surpr
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The reality of our existence for the last 5 years or so has been very partisan.
Well, you say that, but in actuality the rich run both parties, and the rich are getting what they want for the most part, and the rest of us are getting the short straws. This apparently partisan conflict is simply in the script. They re-examine the script every four years or so, decide if they'll run the same president, proceed to have him elected, and then we proceed to blame all of our problems on partisan politics.
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Therefore, it is the Democrats who have been running the government.
I don't deny (and I mentioned as much above) that the Republicans have been complicit in all this Democrat control-freakishness. But the fact still remains that it is Democrat-proposed bills and laws that have been getting passed. It is still the Democrats who have basically been in charge.
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I'm not a big Obama fan (I voted Green the past two elections), but claiming the Democrats have controlled spending for the past 6 years is absurd. The Republicans have controlled the house and the Democrats have done a poor job of negotiating with them (although I'll be willing to accept that the Democrat's goals might not actually differ from the Republicans' as much as they claim).
On the minimum wage, some graphs of the historical value adjusted for inflation [dol.gov] show that $10.10 is in fact matching inflatio
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"On the minimum wage, some graphs of the historical value adjusted for inflation show that $10.10 is in fact matching inflation. It just seems like a large jump because real wages have been decreasing for decades."
You missed my point I think, which was that according to the Democrats themselves, minimum wage is intended to compensate for inflation (as opposed to creating inflation). But: the minimum was raised to $7.25 about 5 years ago... so what does raising it to $10.10 say about real inflation? They're in a position in which they have to either admit that $10 is a ridiculous figure, or admit that their numbers for inflation are scarcely more than fabrications. (I say this knowing other figures that show inflation
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Or it means that the increase to $7.25 was woefully inadequate.
CPI tends to understate inflation.
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You want to blame a 40-50 year long trend on Obama? It could be argued that in the '70s, there was general recession that depressed a lot of things. However, the trend really caught fire with Reagan. GDP shot up, income did not.
We get excuse after excuse but still income is flat while GDP soars. Somehow, the 'solution' always seems to be big tax cuts for the people whose income is already keeping up with the GDP, or less regulations on those same people, or a big fat handout to those who need it least. Yet
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NASA is your pet funding project. Everybody has their own. Republicans like lots of military-industrial pork, Democrats tend to favor health and education.
Tax at the current level of 15% GDP puts us at less than half that of other developed countries which spend much more on health and education and as a result have much healthier and productive workers. US health is about #37 in the world (just behind Slovenia).
Taxes are not a burden on growth if you spend them on health and education plus a social safety
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A 5% budget cut is "the destruction of the greatest source of innovation the U.S. -- and the world -- has ever seen"?
Just for some perspective on Federal government spending, "General Science, Space, and Technology" spending is up 12% (after inflation adjustment) from 2002-2012 and "Health" spending is up 41% during the same period. "Energy" spending is up 2400%.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/... [whitehouse.gov] -- see table 3.2
Re:Welcome to a third-rate USA (Score:5, Informative)
You and I must be reading different journals.
Perspective: Asia's Ascent — Global Trends in Biomedical R&D Expenditures
January 2, 2014
N Engl J Med 2014; 370:3-6
Owing to cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011, the NIH budget for fiscal year 2013 was reduced by $1.7 billion, to $29.2 billion — a 5.5% reduction that continued a trend of declining federal funding for biomedical research that began in 2003.2
Our analysis reveals that U.S. inflation-adjusted R&D expenditures and the U.S. share of global expenditures decreased from 2007 through 2012. The decline is remarkable because the United States has provided a majority of the funding for biomedical R&D globally for the past two decades — a share that some previous analyses suggested was as high as 70 to 80%.2 Moreover, the decline was driven almost entirely by reduced investment by industry, not the public sector, between 2007 and 2012. Sequestration of NIH funding in 2013 and beyond will exacerbate this reduction by causing U.S. public-sector expenditures to decline.
Although our data set has its limitations, our findings reveal a decline in U.S. financial competitiveness in biomedical R&D and may have implications for the debate over appropriate federal policy in this area. The lack of a coordinated national biomedical R&D strategy is disappointing, at a time when mature economies such as those of Japan and Europe have maintained their level of investment in this area.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/ar... [jamanetwork.com]
Funding of US biomedical research, 2003-2008.
JAMA. 2010 Jan 13;303(2):137-43. doi: 10.1001/jama.2009.1987.
Funding of US biomedical research, 2003-2008.
CONCLUSION: After a decade of doubling, the rate of increase in biomedical research funding slowed from 2003 to 2007, and after adjustment for inflation, the absolute level of funding from the National Institutes of Health and industry appears to have decreased by 2% in 2008.
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and "Health" spending is up 41% during the same period. "Energy" spending is up 2400%.
Of course health spending is up. When you spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on one website that doesn't work, what do you expect?
(Not to mention that it does not conform to the government's own privacy laws, etc. I am still waiting for that one to blow up.)
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Get ready for the visionaries who tell us that the source of American innovation is guys working in garages, and all we have to do is lower taxes on garages to unleash the flow of productivity.
Once it was "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage"
Now I can see a time when our chickens are on pot, and we'll be living in garages...
(it does make for a more trippy class of omelets...)
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Tax receipts during say WW2 were much higher, and so was spending.
Yes, spending was much higher during WW2.... on this big ticket item called WORLD WAR 2. You know... the big ticket item which could be cut after the war was over. Are you gonna cut spending on WW2 again now?
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In raw numbers? Perhaps, but we have to consider things like inflation and percentage of GDP.
Well, the cut they are talking about is a cut in raw numbers (of dollars allotted to NIH), so doing comparisons in row numbers is apples to apples comparison here. Btw, Reagan was an amateur compare to Obama when it comes to deficit spending. No one has spent money on a scale that even compares to Obama during peace time... not even close... It's really quite unbelievable how bad he is. He spent so much money in his 1st year, they literally ran out of people to whom they could give the money. They "sti
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Stop listening to the right-wing echo chamber. [wikipedia.org]
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Better? The ones that venerate anti-intellectualism, misogynie, homophobia and starving the poor?
Fuck you.
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Could it be cause of the open-access mandate? (Score:2)
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Actually, current approval rates for grants are around 10-15% and often grants that are funded are typically facing budget reductions at the time of approval, without any change in the scope or specific aims of the proposal. In many cases the cost of research is increasing but the funds available are not increasing at the same rate, thus few projects are being funded.
Re:Could it be cause of the open-access mandate? (Score:5, Informative)
As an actual researcher, let me state that your post has little to no bearing on reality. That is, open-access journals do not prevent an individual or group of individuals from artificially inflating various publication metrics. Moreover, agencies look at much more than those metrics, e.g., research output, research impact, past publication venues, and the number of students who are supported and are expected to graduate under a grant, when deciding how to dole out funding.
Wrong Title Language (Score:5, Insightful)
"Dropped Out" implies it was the decision of the researchers to quit.
Instead it was the decision of the NIH to quit funding them.
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Statistics (Score:2)
New data show that after remaining more or less steady for a decade ...
Did they even look at the graph? It shows a steady decline from 2004 and 2008. The current level had not reached the 2008 level yet.
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I take the Constitution seriously when it says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" in the Bill of Rights.
You, on the other hand, seem to take great satisfaction from flippantly ignoring it.
Austerity (Score:2)
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Take a good look at the graph in TFA. The biggest increase in investigators was during Clinton's second term (peak of the tech bubble) and Bush's first term (onset of recession). i.e. Bush in
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Stop lying. It was an intransigent Republican Congress that set in.
Simple, easy, well-known solutions (Score:1)
There are very simple solutions to this, and that involves not giving the bulk of research money to the same big bloated labs. To do this you must 'stir-up' the allocation business (it is!) to direct younger smaller researches get more the the pie.
No, simple - well known by those in the system - solutions... they just don't follow the same beat as the psycho leaders, is all.
We wouldn't want well established people to be challenged by new sharp people - keep them begging at the door, as we do now in all fiel
Up to 1000 (Score:2)
Pretty damn bad (Score:2)
Let's start with the NIH main campus, in Bethesda, MD, where somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people work every day. That include maintenance, cafeteria and hospital staff. If between 500 and 1000 left, that's 2.5%-5% reduction.
Then consider the fact that it's probably the largest pure medical research institution in the world. Note that I said "pure research" - we're not talking about billions used to find a drug that's equivalent to, or only marginally better than an existing drug... because your pate
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.
And where do you think practicing doctors get their knowledge? That's assuming they keep up with current research, of course.
The thing that makes me cringe is when I hear from physicians, "well, in my experience..." On occasion, they happen to be right and other times, well ....
Physicians are human and are subject to the same bias and irrational thinking as the rest of us. Nothing can replace a well designed study where the results can be reproduced.
And the nice thing about the NIH, they fund studies that have no commercial value (at least in the short term) that add to our knowledge.
Some "stupid" study may reveal something that can be used later or spur someone with an idea of their own.
This mentality of focusing on short term ROI has destroyed our innovation in the US. The last really innovative thing that came out of this country was the Internet and the roots for that were laid down in the 70s.
It's really sad.
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Yep. Most physicians also suffer from the serious flaw that they are terrified of appearing not to know something. When was the last time you heard a physician say "these symptoms are unusual in this combination; let me do a little research and get back to you"?
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You've been talking to the wrong doctors.
I've run into a lot of doctors who would admit that they didn't know something.
I've also run into a few doctors who admitted that they were wrong. As Carl Sagan said, it doesn't happen often but it does happen.
Of course a lot of them were research-oriented, like the guys who get NIH grants.
You ought to get better doctors.
Sample of one proof (Score:2)
Nice sample of one proof you've got there, AC.
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Most NIH funded investigators are Ph.D.s not M.D.s. Those are two different kinds of doctors.
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I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.
There's lots of research that needs doing that doesn't require extraordinary talent - just lots and lots of work (and funding to pay for that work). For example, depending on how,you count, there are somewhere on the order of 20,000 human proteins but many of these proteins have not been studied in detail - or even manually curated/annotated.
But while we could argue about whether there are enough science jobs, I would agree that there are far more science PhDs than available jobs - while there are obviously
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I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.
Where do you think these practicing doctors get the drugs they use to treat people?
Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
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Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
I don't know the breakdown per-disease, but FYI, only about a quarter of all drugs were invented with public funding. In most cases academic research greatly informed the development of new drugs (as intended), but there's a huge gap between "this mutation causes bowel cancer, maybe if we inhibit that protein it will stop progression" to
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Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
The one I was thinking about was AZT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Government-funded researchers developed AZT, tied it up in a package, and handed it to Burroughs-Welcome. Burroughs-Welcome did have some expertise in retroviruses, but they weren't indispensable.
FYI, only about a quarter of all drugs were invented with public funding.
I'd like to know where you get that figure. And I'd like to drill down to see how much of that is new classes of drugs vs. me-too drugs that just stick on a methyl group somewhere.
In most cases academic research greatly informed the development of new drugs (as intended), but there's a huge gap between "this mutation causes bowel cancer, maybe if we inhibit that protein it will stop progression" to "this drug stops bowel cancer". (Huge gap = many years, at least hundreds of millions of dollars.)
There's a problem with the term "invented." Most drugs are the re
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> theÃNational Institutes of Health is an arm of big pharma, get a clue kids
You're flying kidding me right? Do you know what NIH is? What kind of dealing they have with big pharmas? They have strict rules [nih.gov] on big pharmas involvement. If you don't have proof, don't spout nonsense, you asshole!
Re:ÂNational Institutes of Health? (Score:4)
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"Entitlements" are things that people are entitled to.
If I spend 40 years working and putting a big chunk of my income into Social Security and Medicare because the deal was that I'll get it when I'm 65, I think I'm entitled to get it when I'm 65.
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Where is this magical place you think the Social Security Administration should have been saving your contributions? In the stock market? Cubes of cash? Mutual funds? Maybe something safer? Treasury bonds? Well, that's what they did.
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Basically, it's the Asian cultural model where when the parents retire, their kids pay for their living expenses. Except on a
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The Social Security tax rate is 12.4% up to a maximum of $117,000.
If we were to eliminate the maximum, and charge everyone 12.4% of all their income, that would solve any problem the Social Security system had.
Because of the way income is distributed, people with income over $117,000 in the aggregate earn about as much as everybody else put together. So that's where the money is, and they can easily afford it.
People may be living longer now, but they also have a higher level of disability. For example, I sa
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The Social Security tax rate is 12.4% up to a maximum of $117,000.
If we were to eliminate the maximum, and charge everyone 12.4% of all their income, that would solve any problem the Social Security system had.
Only the employee's contribution (6.2% of wages) is capped. The employer contributes 6.2% of wages, with no maximum. But you didn't say "12.4% of wages, you said 12.4% of all income, which would include income from other sources (e.g., interest and investment). Is that what you meant? I don't have a problem with removing the cap on wages, even though it would cost me thousands of dollars every year. But I do have a problem with the idea of a payroll tax on income derived from investing money on which
Entitlements (Score:2)
True on Social Security, but Medicare has been highly undercapitalized since its inception, due to medical cost inflation and recipients' expectations which outstripped all projections when Medicare tax rates were set. Thus your Medicare taxes (and everyone else's) are very unlikely to pay (even accounting for hypothetical investment gains) for your Medicare expenses in old age. The Medicare system is unsustainable as is; the oldsters who got it already got a great deal but sooner or later that will have
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We're paying roughly twice as much for our health care as the Canadians do.
If we want to cut our health care costs, all we have to do is compare our system to Canada's and see what we're doing wrong.