Researchers across the country are looking with anticipation at the federal stimulus bill, hopeful it will provide a brief respite from years of financial strain.
The $787 billion economic stimulus package, signed into law two weeks ago, allocates $10.4 billion to the National Institutes of Health - the major funding agency for biomedical research - and $3 billion to the National Science Foundation.
The money comes at a critical time for researchers. In the last decade, grants from the NIH have become dramatically more competitive. The agency's paylines - the percent of total applications that receive funding- fell from 32 percent in 1999 to 24 percent by 2008.
"The last 10 years have been horrible," said Assistant Professor of Medical Science Richard Freiman. He, along with the research community as a whole, is hoping the stimulus bill is an indication of future federal support for the sciences.
Congress has set a deadline of September 2010 for allocating the stimulus funds. Beyond that date, funding may remain elusive, forcing researchers like Freiman to spend more time chasing after grants than, say, pursuing runaway mice.
"We don't want the faculty and undergraduates to become accountants," said Robert Tamassia, chair of the Department of Computer Science.
Though the stimulus may create relief in the short term, it remains unclear to what degree President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress will be able to boost research spending in the long term.
"It feels like it's a roller coaster," Freiman said. "You just have to hold on until you get back to the top."
A funding bottleneck
Freiman runs a small lab in the Brown research building at 70 Ship Street, using mice to study transcriptional control mechanisms and organ development in mammals.
But recently, teaching a class, managing his lab and writing grant applications have forced him to leave his students to run the majority of the research.
"It's pretty standard to be juggling three balls at once," he said, "I end up in the office preparing lectures and doing grant applications."
"It's not something I was prepared to do," he added.
Researchers spent approximately 42 percent of their "research time" on administrative tasks in 2007, according to a survey completed by the Federal Demonstration Partnership at Northwestern University. Freiman said he spends at least a third of his time writing proposals. In total, he has written over 30 grants - some of which can take up to three months to finish - in the six years he has been at Brown.
The competition for federal funding is particularly tough on first-time researchers and junior faculty members. Because the majority of agencies require preliminary data in applications, investigators may not even begin applying for funding until they are three or four years into lab work.
Brown offers researchers standard start-up funding to cover the cost of these initial years, but leaves investigators on their own from there. "It's almost like being the owner of a small business," Freiman said. "It's challenging for all of us."
Between 1998 and 2003, Congress authorized consecutive increases in the NIH's funding, effectively doubling its budget over a period of six years, said Al Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The increases were heralded with great anticipation by the biomedical world. Encouraged by the possibility of future funding, research facilities dramatically built up their biomedical programs, hiring new faculty and increasing construction of laboratories, Teich said.
Within these shiny new labs, hundreds of hopeful junior faculty and students began their research. But those golden days of increasing spending did not last. The NIH's budget has remained nearly stagnant for the past six years, while inflation has eroded the effective purchasing power of the funds.
"There are some schools that really over expanded," said Tim Leshan, Brown's director of government relations and community affairs. "That's not the case with Brown."
The University's research funding figures have not gone down in the past couple of years, according to Clyde Briant, vice president for research. But "that's not to say," Leshan said, "that there was not the potential for much higher rates had the government provided higher funding."
Despite the budgetary plateau, the number of applications reviewed by NIH each year has increased by about 65 percent since 1998, while the number of grants actually awarded has remained relatively constant.
As their success rates for acquiring funding fall, researchers find themselves filling out more and more applications.
In January, President Ruth Simmons, along with scientific leaders and the heads of 18 other universities, signed a letter to then-President-elect Obama, emphasizing the need to increase scientific research funding as part of any stimulus package. "While some might argue that the current economic crisis should push such plans into the future," the letter read, "we believe, to the contrary, that the stimulus package provides a vital opportunity to begin rebuilding American science."
The "health and vitality of the American scientific enterprise is seriously threatened," the letter read.
Briant said the details on how federal money will be distributed are still unclear. "The stimulus is a moving target," he said.
Briant said his office will act as a "clearinghouse" for all information regarding the stimulus package, adding that faculty, administration and government employees are all working together to ensure the flow of information.
"We will swing into action with each new step," he said.
A broken pipeline
Last March, Brown, with five other American research universities, authored a report, "A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk." Since 2003, according to the report, the NIH has experienced a 13 percent drop in real purchasing power, and research progress has slowed as a result.
The university report profiled 12 early-career researchers, highlighting the difficulties they faced in trying to secure funding. Increased competition, the report argues, will drive a generation of young people away from academe, leaving an unrecoverable gap in scientific progress.
In 1990, young researchers received 29 percent of R01 grants, the major awards offered by the NIH. By 2007, that figure had declined to 25 percent, according to the report.
There are resources available to early-career investigators that currently fund many young Brown researchers, but because they are from private agencies, the packages are small and very competitive, said Tricia Serio, an associate professor of medical science who was among the young researchers profiled in the report.
As a result of increased competition for grant packages, scientists who review NIH proposals have become increasingly conservative in judging applications, Serio said. Proposals must prove a high degree of feasibility, and researchers have become increasingly cautious in their endeavors, she said.
In effect, the system has created an atmosphere that discourages risk, a key element to scientific discovery, Serio said.
"There is feasible, meritorious science not being funded," she added, pointing to the fact that NIH will now be looking at old proposals to fund.
Ultimately, if funding does not come in, researchers will have to shut down their labs. Graduate students and prospective students of the sciences may see the difficulty their superiors face, Serio said, and be discouraged from entering the field.
"The scary part is that we could lose a generation of really good people," she said.
"I think that loss would be permanent," she added. "There's no way to re-enter the pipeline."
Just a Blip?
Because the primary goal of the bill is short-term economic stimulus, the new funding will only be available for a very short period of time.
The level of funding is "gonna go up - and then it's gonna go down," Teich said.
Besides Congress' 2010 deadline, the NSF has set an internal goal of distributing all stimulus funds within 120 days, according to a Feb. 24 New York Times article. The agency will not actively seek new proposals, but will instead finance a greater number of proposals already under review, while looking back at previously rejected ones as well, the Times reported.
"Things are pretty difficult, any help is extremely welcome," Serio said. "But if it's not converted to longer term, we're going be in the same position two years from now."
In addition, White House priorities may still play a role in the direction of funding. Though the NSF is an independent federal agency, the NIH falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, making it more likely to follow the directions of Congress.
The version of the stimulus package passed by the House urged equal geographic distribution of science research funding, but the Senate version, which became law, did not contain such a provision. The NIH announced last week that it will "tweak" its distribution guidelines to ensure "some measure of geographic parity," according to a Feb. 25 article in the Chronicle for Higher Education.
Though Rhode Island is not one of the top receivers of federal funding, it ranks among the top states for research and development intensity, a measure of funding level as a proportion of total Gross State Product that adjusts for the varying size and population of states, according to NSF data from 2007.
On the other hand, Rhode Island, receiving some of the lowest funding overall on a state-by-state basis, is eligible to participate in the NSF's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or EPSCoR , which focuses on small states. That gives Brown a "leg up" in receiving a portion of the stimulus funds, Leshan said.
Though funding may only exist at this elevated level for a short time, it will act as a valuable investment for future efficiency and discovery at the University, Leshan added. He said he sees the stimulus as a "down payment" on future science funding.
The bill allocates $3.5 billion for research and development facilities and large research equipment, according to a breakdown on the AAAS Web site.
Such money for large equipment is usually very hard to come by and will have a significant long-term impact, Briant said, adding that any increase in data collection and research progress will help in applying for future grants.
"We all have concern about this being a two-year blip," he said. "But it will certainly enhance research in the future."
"You've got to hope that the economic situation is a temporary one," Teich said. "What the stimulus is intended to do is get us through the next two years in expectation that things will pick up."
"In that sense, one can expect it to work," he said.
In search of Sputnik
"The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach," Obama said in his address to Congress last week. "They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth."
For decades, the United States has been considered a leading power in scientific research, and some economists estimate that 50 percent of the country's progress since World War II is a product of this new knowledge, Teich said.
Yet some believe the enthusiasm for the sciences may be fading.
"For my generation, it was the space program," Briant said. The "space race" of the 1950s blanketed the nation in a sense of awe and potential, he said, inspiring a generation of youth - gazing up at Sputnik crossing the night sky above their beds - to enter the field of science.
"I worry now," Briant said, "when we don't have things like that."
The fall of federal funding for the sciences is not a recent phenomenon. Spending by the government on investment and research has dropped significantly since the 1950s - from approximately 7 percent of GDP to about 4 percent now.
"If we're underinvesting in research, it's going to hurt us down the line," Briant said.
