It's no secret that biology research in the US is facing a number of challenges. After years of rapid growth, the funding for biomedical research has dropped by 25 percent in real dollar terms since 2003, leaving researchers scrambling to keep their labs running. Meanwhile, the system is still training far more graduates than there are faculty positions to fill. But it's tempting to think that taking care of the first by increasing the funding would help take care of the second.

"Don't kid yourself" seems to be the message of a perspective published this week by PNAS. The authors, Bruce Alberts, Marc Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus (most of whom helped create or expand the current system), say its current course is unsustainable without some deep-rooted reforms. The ones they suggest would produce far fewer graduates and research labs, but they're courses better equipped to keep biomedical research sustainable even without a large budget increase.

The grad student problem

The researchers identify a couple of major structural problems that have made the current system unsustainable. One is simply that graduate students represent the cheapest form of labor, and so graduate programs have expanded to keep researchers well supplied. The end result is that 8,000 people get a PhD in the biological sciences each year, far more than can ever hope to find faculty positions. Only about 20 percent of them end up staying in research positions, yet graduate education generally provides training in nothing but research.

The net result is that 40,000 people are currently stuck in a limbo of post-doctoral positions with little hope of ever converting one of those to a faculty job. While they should be spending time developing skills they could use for alternate careers, they're under intense pressure to produce more research, especially given that post-doctoral positions pay better (and thus cost their employers more money).

More funding might create a few more faculty positions, but if they just demand more grad students, the problem will only get worse. So, the perspective argues that we should shift all graduate students onto government training grants, rather than allowing researchers to pay them from their own grants. That will allow the National Institute of Health to have some say over how many graduate students are produced and start to align that number more closely with the reality of the research budget.

This will require these training grants to be expanded considerably and opened to foreign students, which would mean they'd take a greater fraction of the budget. And it would dramatically shrink the size of most graduate programs, shutter some entirely, and shrink the supply of cheap labor. In other words, almost everyone in a position of power will resist it. The one suggestion that might go somewhere is that graduate training be revised to prepare more students for careers outside the lab.

The authors still assume that we'll want more grad students than we can employ as faculty (which we do; some degree of weeding out is appropriate, and we need some to supply fields like biotech). So we'll still have a bit of a post-doc problem: we've paid large sums of money to train researchers who have no place to go. The solution the perspective suggests is to convert many of these post-docs to staff scientists, experienced researchers who work in labs under the supervision of a faculty member. This would require raising post-doc salaries (so it's not cheaper just to keep someone in limbo) and expanding the funding for staff scientist positions.

This suggestion is more likely to be acceptable to the broader research community, since nobody's prestige or labor is especially threatened by it. But it would still cost money, which is already a problem.

The faculty glut

Given that most of the above measures are necessitated by the fact that there are too few faculty positions for the graduate students that we train, it's ironic that many of the other issues are caused by a glut of faculty. Yet that's the reality—far too many faculty members are applying for far too little money. Many barely have enough to keep their research programs moving and are spending most of their time writing grants rather than thinking about their labs' latest results.

The reason that universities have created so many faculty positions is that having them can be (relatively) lucrative. Most universities require their faculty to pay for a large percentage of their own salary through grants; often 75 percent or more, and sometimes the entire cost. Meanwhile, grants include money given to the university for all the costs associated with playing host to a lab: keeping the lights on, paying the janitors, covering administrative salaries, etc. Plus, the university gets tangible benefits like teaching time and intangibles like the prestige associated with a successful research program.

It's not exactly a profit center, but it sure beats the philosophy department's finances.

So when the NIH's budget was doubled in the 1990s (something overseen by Varmus, one of the authors), universities and research institutes started expanding their departments in order to make sure they got their share of the new wealth. And now, they are still paying off the facilities that are housing faculty that are no longer getting the grants needed to cover all their costs.

The authors of the perspective would do away with faculty positions that are entirely funded by grants and make sure that universities have to make a substantial financial investment in each faculty member they hire. It's the only way to be certain that they don't create too many faculty positions. The general role of payments for institutional expenses should be reformed, the authors argue, but they don't advocate for any specific policy. Again, university administrators (such as Princeton President Tilghman, another one of the authors) will probably hate this, making successful reform a challenge.

Other reforms

The authors call for a number of other changes. Like Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman, they think the over-reliance on publishing papers in luxury journals is a bad thing and want to eliminate it. (Again, one of the authors, Alberts, is editor-in-chief of a luxury journal.) They want to reform grant review so innovative research is more likely to get funding. And they'd like to see less focus on research that can be immediately translated to medical treatments and more emphasis on fundamental research into basic biology to ensure we have the information we need to design therapies. (Varmus, naturally, had been a big backer of translational research during his time leading the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.)

Overall, however, the serious structural reforms the authors are calling for seem to make a great deal of sense. And they are likely to put the biological research effort onto a more sustainable track.

The problem is that everybody who would actually implement these reforms at the institutional level won't like them. Successful researchers will have to accept smaller and more focused labs and see their smaller pool of grad students distracted by training in areas other than research. University administrators will see their departments and incoming money both shrink. You can count on many of them to resist.

But, as the major supporter of biomedical research in the US, the National Institutes of Health are in a good position to dictate terms and overcome opposition. IF it sets and strongly enforces these policies, then everybody will be forced to (at least partially) adapt to them.

But policy is a political matter, and there we have problems. To begin with, as noted, the calls for reform from this group, in many cases, run counter to years of their professional actions. This isn't necessarily a problem in practical terms—we all learn from our experiences—but it can provide people with a powerful political tool if they choose to use it. The second problem is that, right now, our political system is completely dysfunctional, and the height of dysfunction appears to be the House Science Committee. Expecting wide-ranging reforms to be handled wisely by this group is, to put it mildly, unrealistic.

PNAS, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1404402111 (About DOIs).