Opinion: Expansion fever and soft money plague the biomedical research enterprise
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Academic biomedical science has had both a long boom in its funding and a subsequent scary bust. From 1970 to 1999, NIH budgets increased 9% per year (1); from 2000 to 2004, they doubled (2, 3). In 2005 came the unmistakable bust: flat-lined NIH budgets converted the doubling into a paltry 14% increase in inflation-corrected (4) dollars over 16 years (1999–2015; Fig. 1A). But during the bust, two stealthier dangers escaped notice, their quantitative details and significance masked or denied. Universities recklessly overbuilt laboratories to fill with more scientists, just when the bust removed funding increases they needed to do science. As diminished NIH dollars made research riskier, universities required principal investigators (PIs) to earn high proportions of salary from grants, transferring much of the risk to PIs: Universities in the 1970s paid PIs about 75% “hard” salary from their own coffers; those coffers in the 21st century pay PIs much less, forcing them to corral most salary as “soft” grant money.
As these graphs show by tracking national academic research capacity and NIH extramural dollars from 1987 to 2015, infrastructure investments have come to represent a larger portion of available funds. (A) Annual extramural NIH dollars and national academic research capacity in biomedical sciences. (B) Annual extramural NIH dollars and ratios of research ASF to extramural NIH money. Dollars [that is, total research grant plus total research training (2, 3)] are corrected for inflation and expressed in 1995 dollars (4). The biennially tabulated ASF for biological and biomedical plus health and clinical sciences was from the National Science Foundation (see SI Appendix). Bienenstock et al. (5) denied overbuilding on the basis of an analysis similar to that of B, but wrote too early to include ASF data for 2013 and 2015.
Universities have recklessly overbuilt laboratories to fill with more scientists, just when lower funding from NIH eliminated the increases they needed to conduct science. Image courtesy of Dave Cutler.
As responses to specific circumstances, expansion and soft money seemed innocuous during boom decades, when increasing federal grants and indirect cost recovery (ICR) allowed expansion to pay for itself. Then flat-lined NIH budgets after 2004 turned formerly prudent policies into grave dangers, allowing stagnant funding to combine with ever-expanding research facilities and reliance on soft-money salary to corrode job security and opportunities for academic biomedical scientists. Although external funds remain scarce, research universities must act to protect science from soft money and expansion, both of which they control directly. Can academic institutions rescue biomedical research and the next generation of investigators? Yes, but the task will be hard and slow, and success will be piecemeal, not sweeping.
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Acknowledgments
For useful advice, comments, or information, I thank Junko Aimi, Bruce Alberts, Mark Anderson, James Bardsley, David Baltimore, Diana Carmichael, Barry Coller, Joseph Goldstein, Zach Hall, Stephen Heinig, Richard Lifton, Jon Lorsch, David Morgan, Dyche Mullins, John Newell, David O’Brien, Jeremy Reiter, Richard Seligman, Paula Stephan, Eric Vermillion, and Ethan Weiss.
Footnotes
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the author and have not been endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences.
*Choosing not to identify a single university among many that make plans and decisions in much the same way as this university did, I have not listed the scattered but accurate sources that specify this building’s construction costs.
For 2 years, plans and decisions for the building referred to here were known only to a top university official, two department chairs, and the principal donor. These four then consulted university researchers in the field to be explored in the new facility, but 3 years passed before anyone else learned the building’s planned location, size, and purpose. This secrecy was confirmed in conversations between two high officials of the institution and the author.
The assumptions: (i) $192,000 is the average annual total salary plus benefits for all PIs/co-PIs who received some NIH-derived salary, (ii) ICR dollars based on PI/co-PI salary reimbursed at an average rate of 41% of the actual salary and benefits, and (iii) top and bottom estimates of NIH dollars paid in association with soft-money salaries ($5.12–$6.0B) reflect payment from NIH grants of either 80% or 100% of all PI/co-PI person-years (percentages are hypothetical).
Based on written or telephone communications with high officials at these institutions. Other institutions may do the same, of course, but most do not.
In the expansion-fever episode described, the university has committed $489M for building’s total costs (construction plus hidden costs; see text). A similar-sized endowment with an annual payout of 5% per year would produce $24.5M per year, or $100,000 of hard-money salary plus benefits for 245 PIs. Caveats abound, but they are too numerous for discussion here.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1813115115/-/DCSupplemental.
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