NIH Losing $1.7 Billion, 700 Research Grants Due To Sequestration

WASHINGTON -- The National Institutes of Health released an updated projection of the cuts it must make to deal with spending reductions put in place by sequestration, and the picture isn't pretty.

While the National Cancer Institute received $5.06 billion in FY 2012, it is budgeted to receive only $4.77 billion in FY 2013. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences' budget will fall from $2.42 billion to $2.29 billion, meanwhile, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences' budget will fall from $574 million to $542 million. Overall, the NIH's discretionary budget authority will go from $30.7 billion to $29 billion.

Sequestration Stupidity Is Genetic, Hitting Front-Line Medical Research

ST. LOUIS -- Of all the blinkered buzz-saw cuts in this year’s $85 billion spending sequestration, perhaps none is as counterproductive -- or as flat-out boneheaded -- as the one now hitting medical research under way in a refurbished industrial expanse of central St. Louis.

Sequester cuts to the rapidly developing process of turning genetic research into a major 21st-century industry -- and saving lives and health care costs -- are the equivalent of trying to build the Interstate Highway System with no ramps or the transcontinental railroad without the final miles in the middle.

Science for profit: Conservatives target the National Research Council

In 2009, the then-minority Harper government smuggled a seemingly innocuous phrase into the federal budget: "Scholarships granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) will be focused on business-related degrees." Yet this humble sentence garnered a 20,000 signature-strong petition presented to Stephen Harper by MP and future NDP leadership candidate Niki Ashton. For graduate students who signed the petition, the one-time funding increase doubled as a barely audible declaration of intent which sought to nudge Canadian arts research towards the interests of capital.

The phrase also represented a jurisdictional gambit. SSHRC is an arms-length funding body, which, like the CBC or Canada Post, traditionally has remained funded by the House of Commons but outside its direct authority. Parliament should allow the council to set its own agenda; not earmark funds for this-or-that preferred project -- and certainly not for an agenda with the scent of conservative ideology.

So when Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear declared in a March 6 speech given to the Economic Club of Canada that the National Research Council (NRC), Canada's arms-length funding agency for pure science research and development, would be "refocused" and transformed into a "concierge" for business solutions, researchers felt a familiar itch. Goodyear fantasized about the day when the NRC "will be hopefully a one-stop, 1-800, 'I have a solution for your business problem.'" It's hard to deny that conservatives have an impressive sense of humour; clearly engineers and scientists aren't the only ones who know how to push buttons and turn screws.

Understanding Research Funding and Folly in Canada

The role of research funding to an academic's career has never been more important, and yet there is an emerging consensus that the way we organize our system of research grants is broken. While concerns about Canada's model of research funding are longstanding, in recent years they have become increasingly stark. These include perpetual underfunding, charges of bias, and an over-reliance on the peer review system, which favours orthodoxy over innovation. Some believe that this has dumbed downed the professoriate and decreased the quality of expertise in Canadian society. Over time, hiring, promotion and tenure committees have favoured grant writers and grantsmanship over other perhaps more creative and innovative scholars who don't toe the line. There are serious consequences when, as in the current system, you invest in projects and not people.

There are at least three related issues.

First, fewer and fewer academics are getting funded to engage in the research upon which social and technological innovation is based. A variety of other approaches to grant funding could support more researchers and increase research impacts. Case studies suggest that freedom to pursue one's ideas leads to the greatest innovations. Under the existing system, however, the rewards are few, meted out based on what might be called the perversions of peer review justice in which "research funds are literally monopolized by the few who see themselves as the truly excellent researchers according to their own skewed yardsticks."