Speaking of research
A lot of talk these days about reforming the peer review process at the NIH:
Many scientists say the way grants are awarded by the National Institutes of Health — the nation's largest source of money for academic research — is broken. Peer reviewers, critics say, favor applications from tenured researchers for work that could advance knowledge only slightly, at the expense of bold proposals that could lead to huge strides in medicine and health care. The agency is evaluating proposals for reform.
Many researchers apparently agree that the system is messed up.
Seventy-two percent of the postdocs and 59 percent of the grant recipients agreed with this statement: "The 'peer review' system of evaluating proposals for research grants is, by and large, unfair; it greatly favors members of the 'old boy network.'"
And agreement with this statement was almost unanimous: "Eminent scientists and scholars are more likely to receive research grants than others who submit proposals of about the same quality."
Then again:
Some scientists who are skeptical of the reform proposals argue that it's impossible to define innovation precisely or predict who will turn out to be an innovative scientist. In written comments, they voiced worries that steering more money to new programs for young and innovative researchers while the NIH's budget is flat might hurt applicants for the agency's traditional grants.
Several scientists who wrote the NIH said there was nothing broken in the agency's peer review. Researchers could avoid scrapping with each other for money, they said, if academics and patient advocates lobbied Congress for a larger budget.
Some ideas for changing the system here.
I work with these people, the researchers at universities and colleges around the country. They usually start with an idea of the length and cost of the project. It's bad enough that they don't get funding to continue research planned out several years. Epidemeology stuff, where generations of data are pretty important to us, and to thickening the started work. There's a lot to be said for ongoing research.
The process is inherently political. "Paper mills", or labs where publication in a prestigious journal is a near-certainty, certainly exist. And they give a lot of recruitment juice to their home institutions.
There are more docs and post-docs every year, and they have to work somewhere. They compete for a shrinking kitty. I'm not sure if the net result is the migration of talent into industry, where the job is to discover nothing but another way to solubilize something into a different color to be marketed to a different clinical indication.
But yeah, it's true. And it's a shame. But it doesn't show up as vividly as we see it described here when there's money to invest in the public research. Since all the money's at the top, and the top isn't taxable, the chump change slobs like us contribute spreads pretty thin.
December 14, 2007 5:25 PM | Reply | Permalink