Big science: funding

The United States is indisputably a world leader in scientific innovation and research. Prominent researchers from across the world have come to America to form or join labs at premier institutions in all fields of science. This, in turn, attracts more scientists to immigrate, propelling a positive feedback loop America has enjoyed for decades. Remarkably enough, the U.S. government is partly responsible for the scientific boon. Good science starts with money, lots of it, and grants are the backbone of academic research. Just between the NIH and the NSF, federal grants funded over 60,000 different projects in academic institutions last year. The NIH alone earmarked a record $32 billion towards medical research in 2016.

But in recent years, the situation has become less and less rosy. The $32-billion figure may seem like a lot, but it’s only a small step up from a stagnating NIH budget that has tightroped around $30 billion since 2003. As universities continue to pump out PhDs in record-breaking numbers eager to conduct research, the sluggish growth of federal spending reflects an overall dormant funding environment that is not expanding quickly enough to accommodate the ever-growing increase in demand.

The problem is not so much the amount of money that is available, but more so the fluctuations in spending. The same NIH budget that has grown just 5 billion in the last 13 years (2003-2016) is in stark contrast to its previous five years (1998-2003), when it nearly doubled in size from $15.6 billion to $27.2 billion. This rise in government allocation prompted an influx in university spending on new research facilities and hiring faculty, as well as grant proposals, which sharply rose within this time frame and have continued to increase in recent years. The steadily declining rate of awarded grants since 2003 exhibits the lack of funding that has continued to plague academic labs.

The consequences of the flatlining budget go beyond simply lab downsizing, but also affects the integrity and novelty of the science itself. Even as of just a few decades ago, academic research was still considered the quintessence of unrestricted scientific exploration. Large-scale projects that scientists wanted to take on were unbridled by the pressures of funding or publication. Since then, much has changed in the scientific community in terms of the freedom of research that people pursued.

Dr. Roger Kornberg, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his group’s fundamental discoveries about RNA transcription, believes that had he started his work in the past decade instead of in the 1970s, it would have never gotten off the ground due to funding scarcities. In his own words, “If the work that you propose to do isn’t virtually certain of success, then it won’t be funded. And of course, the kind of work that we would most like to see take place, which is groundbreaking and innovative, lies at the other extreme." Some of the greatest breakthroughs we as humanity have yet to achieve may continue to be pushed back because they are too high-risk or they don't have any obvious, currently known direct applications.

Furthermore, hypercompetitive funding environment can foster bad science by overly stressing positive results and incentivizing successful but trivial research projects. Newer faculty yearning for tenure must be able to prove to their departments their ability in acquiring grants, which can lead to the pursuit of simply “publishable” material that does not actually further our knowledge in the field and are often inconsequential corollaries of already known research. Even worse, the pressure of obtaining funding has caused many to fake or stretch their experimental results, risking their scientific integrity.

There is no obvious resolution to a lack of funding besides increasing the amount of money designated for scientific research. Laboratories are learning how to be leaner and more cost-efficient, but it will not be enough to compensate for the influx of new PhDs and potential research projects. It's unfortunate that the endeavor of science must be tied up with politics and economic turbulence. But for the sake of our and future generations, we as scientists need to remain involved in the “real world” to continue expanding humanity’s knowledge basis and help solve the multitude of problems we will end up facing in the coming years.

Junu Bae is a graduate student in the chemistry department. His column, "interested in everything," runs on alternate Fridays. This column is the first in a series exploring issues afflicting scientific research in the 21st century.