To cut, or how to cut, that is the question

We have criticized the current science funding and approach many times and in many ways here on MT.  Essentially, there is waste, relentless pressure to churn out safe incremental results, and pressure to rely on Big Science for a variety of reasons, some of which have as much to do with careerism as the science itself. The science establishment has been overpopulated in a Malthusian way, even knowingly, and we have noted how and why this understandably leads to various forms of shading of the evidence, including outright fraud.

These are facts that only the most Pollyannish people in science, or perhaps Francis Collins politicking in defense of NIH's budget, would deny.

We have said to the contrary, that grant budgets should be cut substantially.  The objective would be to force investigators to work on more cogent problems, more likely to return useful practical or theoretical results to the society that funds the work, and do that at more reasonable cost.  But we would encourage longer-term funding, and caps on how much any one investigator can have, to spread the wealth.  We know that this, like any such distribution policy, would generate some waste and inefficiency, but it could hardly be more than it is currently, and might increase the chance of real innovative discovery.  Faculty for whom research is part of their job, should be given modest research budgets without having to pass 'peer' review, but accountable instead by periodic demonstration of capable thoughtful work.  Projects, especially big ones, ought to have clear and definitive time limits.  Universities should be weaned off their addiction to grant overhead, and career-building needs to be returned to evaluations based more on originality, depth, and impact than on lobbied, gamed production mills.

But how can it be good to cut funding when it's already so tight?
It has been objected that the probability of funding is already very low--some institutes at the National Institutes of Health are said to be funding only 8% of grant applications--so that cutting could hardly have salubrious effects!  How can we rectify a belief that the system of science is too bloated with the fact that reduced budgets would make it even harder to be funded?

This is a fair question, and the answer isn't simple, but let's try to explain our view, at least.  First, funding is tight perhaps, but the 8% figure doesn't represent the whole story.

A large amount of research support by NIH at least, and probably NSF as well, goes to internally driven programs or projects, perhaps like funding DNA sequencing centers, or to semi-competitive contract bids, or to RFP's.  RFPs are NIH's requests for proposals to address some particular area that they have been convinced need attention; RFP's are drafted with external consultants and in our experience the funding mainly goes more or less predictably to insiders, already established in the field, partly because they're in effect designed or aimed that way, which leaves most proposals coming opportunistically out of the blue and truly far off the fundability mark.

In addition, the low per-proposal rate, whether it's 8% or in fact higher, just leads investigators to submit reams of proposals every year, so that while most proposals may not be funded, most investigators do get some funding.  And if you look at what's funded, you wonder how that could happen if funds were really so tight that only really good science would make the mark.

This same overheated system means less time investigators spend doing any actual work because they're writing so many grant applications, and that leads investigators to routinely overstate what they have done, and to be very safe in proposing what they want to do in the future.  It generates large sets of administrators to handle the processing, etc.  And, of course, to the shading of truth in various ways.  You can't expect otherwise.

Further, there is a very conscious and intentional drive to propose bigger and longer studies on various grounds, some legitimate but many trumped up as rationales, so investigators can manage big groups for long time periods.  Bigger means safer and more status and influence on campus.  You can't fault people for thinking grandly, or seeking more security.  A concentration of funds in Big Science is not good for science overall if it leads to quickly diminishing returns but too-big-to-terminate projects, and this we think is quite common, indeed almost the rule.  The move to 'omics' scale work is very deliberately done and in part for these fiscal and careerist rather than scientific reasons.

Of course, the same, predictably, also drives universities to want more overhead income--universities get a hefty percentage of the budget of just about every grant their faculty members receive, money over and above the grant budget, that goes straight from the funding agency to the university--so there are all sorts of pressures on the system itself to go Big.  There is no reason universities shouldn't keep wanting to expand: in the way we view the world in the business-modeled US and EU, size, growth, and competition are everything.  Investigators who aren't funded can, well, survive however they can survive.  Or not.  Pressures are naturally for 'faculty' to teach less if at all, and do less actual work so they can spend their time and effort on grant-writing.  So naturally we tend to hype every little factoid to the media and publish a relentless stream of (usually never-cited) papers.  Anyone who denies the pervasiveness of this is being disingenuous.

Considering all these factors, however tight funding is it's in part because the system is still bloated without constraints to make people do more focused, accountable, work.  Or to become more efficient.  Or more honest, if it comes to that.

If budgets were cut to the point that NIH and perhaps also NSF and others, had really to evaluate what is most necessary, focused, and likely to yield returns, and to stop things that aren't, and to curb university overhead-greed and administrative overload, and to restrain NIH's and NSF"s own big publicity hype machines, and so on, we could perhaps--perhaps--make things more scientifically efficient.

If we slowed down and scaled back, and made funding more predictable and longer-term, but per capita smaller, and changed to a way of thinking that led to fewer but better-trained graduate students, fewer post-docs, smaller faculty and research staff, smaller and less bloated operations overall, then science might be advanced and perhaps even at a lower cost.  And funding, though more modest perhaps, would be easier to get.

But without real tightening, it is in nobody's interests--certainly not those who accept the Darwinian worldview that life is all about relentless competition and winner-take-all rewards--to change the way they do business.  As it is now, competing more frenetically is the strategy that is perceived to have the best chances of success.

But what about the jobs at stake?
Any cuts will involve threats to jobs and hence draw resistance of whatever sort universities and investigators and other lobbyists can muster.  But there are honorable ways to cut.  Phased budgetary cut-backs could give universities time to adjust.  They could downsize by not replacing personnel who leave or retire, for example.  Phased change that is clearly signaled with enough time to adapt is a proper and feasible way to do things.

A return to more measured expectations and modest but focused work, done in a humanely phased way, could rectify some of the issues and improve the yield of knowledge and 'translatable' results to the public. 

What I already did or won't actually do but will promise....if only you'll gimme a grant

The problem
An important commentary appeared in the September PLoS Biology, though we have only just stumbled across it. It has already been viewed close to 30,000 times but seems to have generated little discussion, either on the PLoS website or in the blogosphere. Indeed, we wonder why so few have wanted to comment, since the article points to serious problems that we all know about, and describes them accurately. We think the subject deserves more attention.

In his paper, with a title that says it all, "Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research: the Granting System Turns Young Scientists into Bureaucrats and then Betrays Them", Peter Lawrence, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge and Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom makes a strong case for the need for drastic change in the way science is funded. Lawrence is a highly regarded developmental biologist, with a long and distinguished research record in patterning in general and the genetics of development of the fruit fly in particular. He also has many times confronted problems in the politics of science head on. He has no qualms about telling it as he sees it; his is a very welcome and needed voice. Since he has not been a research failure, his views can be taken seriously: they are not just sour grapes.

In the paper, he argues that the status quo is not good for young scientists. The incessant need to apply for research money takes far too much time, encourages conventional thinking, and even lies. As he says,

To expect a young scientist to recruit and train students and postdocs as well as producing and publishing new and original work within two years (in order to fuel the next grant application) is preposterous. It is neither right nor sensible to ask scientists to become astrologists and predict precisely the path their research will follow—and then to judge them on how persuasively they can put over this fiction. It takes far too long to write a grant because the requirements are so complex and demanding. Applications have become so detailed and so technical that trying to select the best proposals has become a dark art. For postdoctoral fellowships, there are so many arcane and restrictive rules that applicants frequently find themselves to be of the wrong nationality, in the wrong lab, too young, or too old.

And, he tells his own story:

After more than 40 years of full-time research in developmental biology and genetics, I wrote my first grant and showed it to those experienced in grantsmanship. They advised me my application would not succeed. I had explained that we didn't know what experiments might deliver, and had acknowledged the technical problems that beset research and the possibility that competitors might solve problems before we did. My advisors said these admissions made the project look precarious and would sink the application. I was counselled to produce a detailed, but straightforward, program that seemed realistic—no matter if it were science fiction. I had not mentioned any direct application of our work: we were told a plausible application should be found or created. I was also advised not to put our very best ideas into the application as it would be seen by competitors—it would be safer to keep those ideas secret.

The implications
This will resonate with anyone who has written a grant proposal--or taken a class on 'grantsmanship'. The process is less about good ideas than about gaming the system, and this takes more and more time. Science, we are proud to boast publicly, rests on truth and trust--that's why plagiarism or fudged experiments are treated so harshly.

But what about the routine kinds of dishonesty that our system fosters? People rarely admit it publicly, but it is absolutely routinely acknowledged in private that, along with the dissembling Peter describes, proposals are submitted for large amounts of funds for work that has already been done, or that the investigator knows won't deliver what is promised (and, often, simultaneously hyped in the public media). What about dissembling by the manipulation of data to present it in a technically honest way that nonetheless biases the impression of the importance of the data and of the authors' conclusions?

These issues are but the tip of a potentially destructive iceberg. The current system builds big empires with large, long-term and hence unstoppable entrenched budgets. The system encourages large teams of workers, hires large numbers of post-docs as its cogs, and actively lobbies publicly and privately to secure its funding base. Peter discusses how large groups can cover for the low-yield of many of their members.

Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting funds for your research. But when it becomes institutionalized, is based heavily on competition, and careers (and university budgets) depend on a steady stream, the pressures unite in the direction of grantsmanship: gaming the system first to secure funding and then, if there's time, to do something innovative. But when you're preoccupied with securing the funds, there's much less time or even incentive to think about the real science questions.

Fundability often means safety and that means predictability which in turn often means incremental rather than major advances. Research in some areas of biology is very expensive, to be sure, and new technologies definitely do help reveal facts we could not otherwise obtain. But sequestering of resources in a few hands, or for a few technologies, deprives other avenues of resources. The safety-first system encourages (forces?) most investigators to use the technology for various understandable reasons: being fashionable, hiding a lack of ideas behind the predictability of at least some descriptive results if new technology is applied, and equating large-scale with importance. This systematically rewards investigators and of course pleases their Deans who get the overhead.

To be sure, a lot of good science is being done! No system can guarantee that more than a fraction of science will have lasting value. Most papers are hardly ever cited other than by their own authors, and the shelf-life of most research in these overheated days is very short. The distribution of quality has probably always been skewed towards a majority of trivia. And it is reasonable that we have some ways to weed out sluggish or useless yet costly research. This is especially true when there are more claimants than funds, and this is one direct consequence of the system we have now.

But when the rewards of successful grantsmanship are great, they lead to manipulation of the system, as we have seen over the past few decades, and everyone's research becomes "paradigm shifting" on the proverbial cutting edge.

Peer review, designed as one means to reduce the clubbiness of the OldBoy system, has done some of that, but people are hierarchy builders and have long ago figured out to build new kinds of OldBoy systems. Bureaucrats, too, want their portfolios of funded clients, as that helps them (the bureaucrats) build their own careers. But portfolios are jeopardized if there isn't continuity, so investigators have relatively clear paths to continued funding....whether or not they have generated really solid ideas.

We also have a crazily proliferating number of journals, and they allow piles of 'supplemental information' (often sloppily written) to be included. This leads to a tsunami of content that we simply can't keep up with, even within specialty areas--we've commented on this before on this blog. And the pressures mitigate against teaching, because rewards are for funded research. Scientists aren't stupid: we go where the rewards are!

The solution?
We undoubtedly must live with inefficiency in science. If you're really exploring the unknown, you can't know what you'll learn. Most ideas don't pan out. But a kind of evolutionary ecology perspective is worth taking: an ecosystem is most robust to environmental change when it is most diverse. A larger number of funded scientists, perhaps all with less funding, with high-end resources housed in technology service centers, could foster a higher probability and faster flow of really new ideas.

The problems are deeper and more subtle even than all of this, though. It's become a positive-feedback system. Status depends on having students, and the more the merrier. Rather than being sane, and mutually paring back to, say, generational replacement levels in which we each train only one or two students in our careers, the system encourages us to take more graduate students, to help us write more papers and get more grants, and then to do the work on the grants. That means more competition for fewer jobs and grants. We can't taper back because everyone would have to agree to that, and we're not in an altruistic mode these days. So, the squeeze is on--mainly on the young aspirants to science careers. Our university, like your university, wants more!

There is no easy solution for a positive-feedback system, particularly because universities have become so fundamentally dependent on overhead money from grants. Professor Lawrence proposes the shortening of grant applications. But daily life out here in the field immediately reveals that such changes simply encourage many more applications per person, since it's less work to do each one and they can be parceled, packaged, slightly modified and so on, in many ways. The overall probability of funding probably will go down, if anything. The US Stimulus grants showed that, when some 20,000 or so applications were submitted--because the applications were relatively easy--for around 200-300 grants. And the administrative overhead, of preparing and submitting grants can't change much per grant, so will go up and up and up, eating further into the useful amount of funds.

One can say that this is a harsh system but that, like natural selection, it screens out the worst and favors the best. That's true certainly to some extent. But who says that human life must be made harsh, to feed the self-interest of a few?

The burden will fall on the new people who are entering, or hope to enter, the fields of science. We owe it to them to resist a system that systematically grinds the spirit, or even the careers, out of so many.

We may all have dreams, and may all seek dream jobs. But not every dream is fulfilled, and not every dream job turns out to be a dream. Some, even as students, look at their research professors' lives and say "not for me!" Others are lured by the status system into high-pressure, grant-dependent careers that turn out to be relentlessly tense, by which time it may be to late for the person to taper back and get a less-intense job.

But the system as it now exists is structured to make you feel like a failure if you don't have grants, don't publish frequently in 'High Impact' journals, or --heaven forbid -- like to teach! Nobody should feel disappointed, disillusioned or like a failure because they didn't live up to somebody else's -- to the System's -- notion of success, a notion that is in their, but perhaps not your, self interest. But it's very hard to resist the allure of illusion.

Beyond shorter grant applications, what other solutions does Lawrence propose? Smaller, less costly labs, longer lasting grants (5 years minimum), the option of being judged on past research rather than future plans, less reliance on citation counts. Others have proposed more radical changes, such as all researchers being given a research allowance, that automatically gets renewed for those doing good work -- the obvious problem with this is that it's readily gameable too.

These issues are deep and many, and need to be discussed. The system needs to reward good science again, and young researchers need to be able to expect to retain their love of science long into their careers.

Peter Lawrence lays out the problems in an honest and straightforward way. If you're a scientist, particularly if you are just embarking on your career, you owe it to yourself to read, and talk about, his paper. We'll write more about this in our next post, but meanwhile, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

-Anne and Ken