Will NIH funding affect your career choices?

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StereoSanctity

StereoSanctity

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Just curious.
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Yup...it just did. After doing the MD/PhD and a research pathway residency/fellowship, the funding climate is just too much for me to deal with and I've decided to go FT clinical in September of this year.

It was a very hard decision and it feels like a very important part of me has died. But honestly, now that I made the choice, I'm sleeping better than I have in 6 months.
 
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Keep in mind that the doubling of the NIH budget in the early 2000's led to an explosion of PhDs been hired by universities. The effects of this event still have significant consequences in actual dollars (i.e.:60-70% higher as compared to pre-doubling). In a system based approach, those extra "competitors" are been squeezed out of the system at a much higher rate. Funding has ups and downs... We are looking at a bear market for funding for the next 5-10 years, but I suspect funding will peak again at even higher adjusted levels at some point within 10-20 years. For those currently doing MD/PhDs, that is the outlook, in my view. Furthermore, with funding rates in the 40% for F and K awards, current MD/PhDs should worry more about the present (i.e.: making an impact with pubs) than the funding forecast. Funding conditions will improve just in time for them.

FYI: I have seen 3 significant downturns in NIH funding in my 20+ year career. Each time, a new high was achieved.
 
Fencer said:
Keep in mind that the doubling of the NIH budget in the early 2000's led to an explosion of PhDs been hired by universities. The effects of this event still have significant consequences in actual dollars (i.e.:60-70% higher as compared to pre-doubling). In a system based approach, those extra "competitors" are been squeezed out of the system at a much higher rate. Funding has ups and downs... We are looking at a bear market for funding for the next 5-10 years, but I suspect funding will peak again at even higher adjusted levels at some point within 10-20 years. For those currently doing MD/PhDs, that is the outlook, in my view. Furthermore, with funding rates in the 40% for F and K awards, current MD/PhDs should worry more about the present (i.e.: making an impact with pubs) than the funding forecast. Funding conditions will improve just in time for them.

FYI: I have seen 3 significant downturns in NIH funding in my 20+ year career. Each time, a new high was achieved.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree with any of this assessment, except to say that I hope you're right (and historically you are).

This is the 2nd significant downturn that I've seen since starting my training. I was able to weather the first one just by virtue of good timing. But I don't have the time or patience to try to ride this one out.

I already waited to age 40 to get my first real job...I can't wait until age 50 to try to get my first R01.
 
gutonc said:
Yup...it just did. After doing the MD/PhD and a research pathway residency/fellowship, the funding climate is just too much for me to deal with and I've decided to go FT clinical in September of this year.

It was a very hard decision and it feels like a very important part of me has died. But honestly, now that I made the choice, I'm sleeping better than I have in 6 months.
Click to expand...

Are you taking an academic position, where you could come back into the fold at some point?
 
gbwillner said:
Are you taking an academic position, where you could come back into the fold at some point?
Click to expand...

I actually have an academic position. I'm just converting it to all clinical (well...0.75FTE). I will remain part of a GI cancer translational research group and will continue to work on clinical trials. But I'm done trying to pay my mortgage with NIH money because that's just never going to happen.
 
gutonc said:
I actually have an academic position. I'm just converting it to all clinical (well...0.75FTE). I will remain part of a GI cancer translational research group and will continue to work on clinical trials. But I'm done trying to pay my mortgage with NIH money because that's just never going to happen.
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When MD/PhDs run out of grants and get difficulties renewing, as in the current economy, what are the fallback options ? I have figured the most common path is to do more clinical or become full-time clinical. What about the options of going into biopharmaceutical industry ? Can one still remain in research that way ? Can one do bench-top research in biopharmaceutical industry or is it always clinical trial ?
 
FactorX said:
When MD/PhDs run out of grants and get difficulties renewing, as in the current economy, what are the fallback options ? I have figured the most common path is to do more clinical or become full-time clinical. What about the options of going into biopharmaceutical industry ? Can one still remain in research that way ? Can one do bench-top research in biopharmaceutical industry or is it always clinical trial ?
Click to expand...

All of the above. If you can do it with an MD or a PhD, you can do it as an MD/PhD. You may have a harder time finding a position, or living with the pay. But you can do it.
 
gutonc said:
You may have a harder time finding a position, or living with the pay.
Click to expand...

Can you elaborate more ?

So, typically in that transition scenario, one will need to start over in an entry position in the biopharmaceutical company (such as monitor or sub-PI ?) to get experience ? I guess that will leave one with lower pay and make the financial situation even harder.
 
FactorX said:
Can you elaborate more ?

So, typically in that transition scenario, one will need to start over in an entry position in the biopharmaceutical company (such as monitor or sub-PI ?) to get experience ? I guess that will leave one with lower pay and make the financial situation even harder.
Click to expand...

It is unlikely that you'll move "up" in the scenario you described when moving from academics to research. Not impossible, but unlikely.
 
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Anyone who is willing to tie their career to a continous stream of Federal grant money deserves the fate they will get.

There will be a reckoning one day, sooner rather than later, when many many labs will be flushed down the toliet. We just dont have the $ to continue even the paltry funding the NIH institutes now provide....

And this is at the same time Universities themselves will come under full assault from their crazy tuition inflations and a full retreat of state funding.

We havent even seen anything close to a bottom, "Researchageddon" is coming and bringing hell with it.

Even the private sector will get hit on this one.

Get out now and find a real trade.
 
LADoc00 said:
Anyone who is willing to tie their career to a continous stream of Federal grant money deserves the fate they will get.

There will be a reckoning one day, sooner rather than later, when many many labs will be flushed down the toliet. We just dont have the $ to continue even the paltry funding the NIH institutes now provide....

And this is at the same time Universities themselves will come under full assault from their crazy tuition inflations and a full retreat of state funding.

We havent even seen anything close to a bottom, "Researchageddon" is coming and bringing hell with it.

Even the private sector will get hit on this one.

Get out now and find a real trade.
Click to expand...

NIH Budget - $30.9 billion per year
Cost of developing the F-35: $1.5 trillion

Had the US not ever wasted money on the terrible, overdesigned POS that is the F-35 and instead put that $1.5 trillion aside for the NIH, it would have been enough to fund the NIH at current levels for the next 48.5 years. To say that we don't have money to fund science research shows a staggering ignorance of the nature of the federal budget.

PRO TIP: The only three items in the federal budget that, if reduced, will result in non-trivial debt reduction are social security, medicare/medicaid, and military spending (in that order).

It's because of people like you that our politicians even bother cutting helpful programs that add almost nothing to the federal budget, instead of cutting the programs that actually need to be cut while simultaneously raising taxes.
 
OCDOCDOCD said:
NIH Budget - $30.9 billion per year
Cost of developing the F-35: $1.5 trillion
Click to expand...

For a split second I thought the F-35 was some NIH grant that Id never heard of. Then I realized it must be some kind of fighter jet.. :laugh:
 
Fencer said:
Keep in mind that the doubling of the NIH budget in the early 2000's led to an explosion of PhDs been hired by universities. The effects of this event still have significant consequences in actual dollars (i.e.:60-70% higher as compared to pre-doubling). In a system based approach, those extra "competitors" are been squeezed out of the system at a much higher rate. Funding has ups and downs... We are looking at a bear market for funding for the next 5-10 years, but I suspect funding will peak again at even higher adjusted levels at some point within 10-20 years. For those currently doing MD/PhDs, that is the outlook, in my view. Furthermore, with funding rates in the 40% for F and K awards, current MD/PhDs should worry more about the present (i.e.: making an impact with pubs) than the funding forecast. Funding conditions will improve just in time for them.

FYI: I have seen 3 significant downturns in NIH funding in my 20+ year career. Each time, a new high was achieved.
Click to expand...

This is the part that confuses me. If the NIH budget has doubled, why are so many labs struggling to find funding? The number of PI's has not increased significantly so one would expect some cuts to the size of awarded grants but not the number of grants awarded. What am I missing?
 
jissho said:
This is the part that confuses me. If the NIH budget has doubled, why are so many labs struggling to find funding? The number of PI's has not increased significantly so one would expect some cuts to the size of awarded grants but not the number of grants awarded. What am I missing?
Click to expand...

Who says the number of PIs has not increased significantly? It is. The number of PhD programs in the country has actually increased dramatically. Biomedical research used to be a much more "elitist" endeavor with only very few institutions granting PhDs, and PhDs were much more selective as well. Since the 80s, NIH funding increased, PhD programs expanded, training grants are more liberally given, individual grants are more freely given, resulting in people getting hired for PhDs and postdocs, especially international students. But even in the best times getting federal funding was competitive. It's just not THAT competitive. When the funding line is in the single digits, a lot of randomness becomes apparent and a lot of nepotism becomes dominant.

Look, you can't really compare these things. Say, oh I'd be much better off 20-30 years ago. You know what, 20 years ago with your talent you probably wouldn't have even gotten INTO a PhD program. Especially if you are a woman or an ethnic minority. Now they are just distributing things differently, and in an arguably more "meritocratic" way.

30 years ago most of the inner cities are not livable. 30 years ago nobody comes to the US for PhD training. Do you REALLY want to go back in time?

My take is, grants are not gonna get better. It's only getting worse. Things are gonna get more competitive, not less. Either you stay in the game or you leave. Macroscopically there's nothing you can do. Microscopically if you don't happen to get your OWN grant application funded for whatever reason, it's time to leave--and you don't really have any other option anyway. The lottery is just drawn much later in life, which creates problems, but it has to be drawn at SOME POINT, and we ARE dying and retiring a lot later now...How are you gonna change your career anyway...I mean, I can change my career regardless of whether my grant gets funded, which while is distantly related how much NIH actually has to dispense, is only tangentially caused by this proximally.

Also, LADoc is just being facetious. As a residency trained MD, you'll always have a job. Sure you are taking a risk here, but it's not like you are trying to be an artist. Come on.... stop being dramatic.
 
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jissho said:
This is the part that confuses me. If the NIH budget has doubled, why are so many labs struggling to find funding? The number of PI's has not increased significantly so one would expect some cuts to the size of awarded grants but not the number of grants awarded. What am I missing?
Click to expand...

A couple of obvious things off the top of my head...I'm sure Fencer and others will have more to add.

1. Costs have gone up. Salaries, reagents, equipment, services, etc. All more expensive. And in the "Big Data" era (Next-gen sequencing, proteomics, GWAS, high-throughput screens, etc) it's no longer just a tech, a couple of grad students and a few post-docs to run a medium-sized lab. Now you need all those people plus a programmer, a statistician, an engineer and a data manager. Sure, all that stuff can be done using core facilities or contractors (i.e., they don't have to be FT employees of the lab) but that still costs money. Individual NIH grant amounts haven't gone up at the rate that doing the work costs. So what used to be able to be done with 1 R01 and a couple of small pilot project grants now takes 3 R01s, and 20% of the effort of a PPG.

2. Risk aversion. Every granting organization (NIH, foundation, NSF, whatever), wants to make sure that the money they spend will get a good return on investment. So if you want to ensure that your money is well spent, and you have two equally good grants in front of you, one from a new PI with a small publication/funding history a tech and 2 grad students, the other from an Endowed professor with 6 R01s, a PPG and small army of "Research Assistant Professors" with their own R03s, R21s and K99s and a publication record made up entirely of senior author publications in Science, Nature and Cell, guess who's going to get that money? (Pro Tip...not the new dude.)

3. Decreased Foundation and Pharma funding. If you think the pay lines on NIH grants are bad, look at the stuff from foundations. I applied for an AACR Foundation Career Development grant last year. They had 6 grants of $100K/y for 2 years. I met with one of the grant reviewers who was interviewing for a faculty position here who told me they had over 400 applications for that grant. Pharma is just as bad, especially for new/young investigators.
 
gutonc said:
A couple of obvious things off the top of my head...I'm sure Fencer and others will have more to add.


2. Risk aversion. Every granting organization (NIH, foundation, NSF, whatever), wants to make sure that the money they spend will get a good return on investment. So if you want to ensure that your money is well spent, and you have two equally good grants in front of you, one from a new PI with a small publication/funding history a tech and 2 grad students, the other from an Endowed professor with 6 R01s, a PPG and small army of "Research Assistant Professors" with their own R03s, R21s and K99s and a publication record made up entirely of senior author publications in Science, Nature and Cell, guess who's going to get that money? (Pro Tip...not the new dude.).
Click to expand...

This is, to me, most irksome. It seems that the better way to analyze a lab's productivity is not in the publication record or funding history, but in some sort of way that accounts for both. The most crude statistic would just be (total impact factor of all publications in last X years) divided by (total funding in last X years). From a granting organization's perspective, the current approach sort of makes sense, but it's my experience that smaller labs run much more "lean"...and therefore are more likely to produce the most bang for your buck.
 
OCDOCDOCD said:
PRO TIP: The only three items in the federal budget that, if reduced, will result in non-trivial debt reduction are social security, medicare/medicaid, and military spending (in that order).
Click to expand...

:confused: Any reduction in defense spending will result in a direct savings and reduce the federal deficit. However, Social Security is self funding and currently has a $2.6 trillion surplus that is held in US Gov. debt securities. Cutting Social Security benefits would increase the SSA surplus, not pay down debt. Medicare is also self funding but does not have the large surplus that the SSA currently has. Any cuts to Medicare would not reduce the deficit. It would increase the Medicare Trust Fund.

Citizens of this country really should know this stuff.
 
plumazul said:
:confused: Any reduction in defense spending will result in a direct savings and reduce the federal deficit. However, Social Security is self funding and currently has a $2.6 trillion surplus that is held in US Gov. debt securities. Cutting Social Security benefits would increase the SSA surplus, not pay down debt. Medicare is also self funding but does not have the large surplus that the SSA currently has. Any cuts to Medicare would not reduce the deficit. It would increase the Medicare Trust Fund.

Citizens of this country really should know this stuff.
Click to expand...

At least for Medicare, what you've written isn't correct. Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) is funded by a separate payroll tax, which when revenues exceed outlays is deposited in the Medicare trust fund. However, Medicare Parts B and D are not - they are funded by a combination of premiums from beneficiaries and general government revenue. Furthermore, when the Medicare Trust Fund is exhausted (when exactly that will happen is a moving target), Medicare Part A will have to be partially funded by general government revenue as well. My understanding is that a similar logic applies for social security as well. Controlling entitlement spending is most definitely relevant to discussions about the deficit.
 
sluox said:
Also, LADoc is just being facetious. As a residency trained MD, you'll always have a job. Sure you are taking a risk here, but it's not like you are trying to be an artist. Come on.... stop being dramatic.
Click to expand...

No, he's really not. He's been saying this stuff for years, as well as that they should shut down 98% of pathology residency programs.

/just of taste of the path forum on this site.
 
gutonc said:
I don't disagree with any of this assessment, except to say that I hope you're right (and historically you are).

This is the 2nd significant downturn that I've seen since starting my training. I was able to weather the first one just by virtue of good timing. But I don't have the time or patience to try to ride this one out.
Click to expand...

Ran into this graphic today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...89e4-8a97-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e_graphic.html

w-hopkins.jpg
 
Neuronix said:
Ran into this graphic today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...89e4-8a97-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e_graphic.html

w-hopkins.jpg
Click to expand...

Nice. If you count my time working in a lab as an undergrad, I've seen 3 downturns (although I wasn't paying attention at that point, and that lab could have lost 3 R01s and still had too much money). And unfortunately, that broad rise and relatively flat period corresponds exactly to my decision to do MD/PhD and enter the training path I did. It's been all downhill since.
 
That graph isn't even all that accurate and is on the optimistic side of things. Only about 1/3rd of NIH's budget goes to basic research. If you look at all investigator initiated project grants, i.e. not training grants, the funding rate for places like NCI, it's been in the single digits for a number of years.

On the other hand, I'm assuming that nobody expects every one of their grants to get funded on the first submission. The choices you can make are either go into this career or not. If you don't go into this career, your chances of getting to the point of full time research is 0%. So it's 0% vs. 9% (for cancer research). You can say 9% is just not worth it, but maybe 30% is worth it. :laugh: Is this a rational way of thinking about this?
 
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