I know I have not posted on this blog since 2018. This was due to a number of things, including the pandemic, but primarily it was because too much was going on and finding time to write was a bit challenging. However, given events so far this year, I thought I would start posting again starting with what I am thinking will be a short series highlighting various aspects of the recent attack on biomedical research.
You can see long rows of pain medications, decongestants, treatments for athlete's feet, cough medicines, and other over the counter medications or devices when you enter a drugstore or even in your local grocery. You grab what you need, pay, and leave without thinking too much about where all these options came from. Many times you're just thankful you can deal with your issue by going to the local drugstore, rather than having to make an appointment to see your doctor or to go to urgent care. But, sometimes you have to go see your doc or urgent care. While you might have blood draws, testing of some
receive prescriptions for drugs or physical therapy, you again walk away without a thought about how these things are part of the arsenal to aid in your health. In less fortunate cases, you might need surgery or other major life-saving efforts and while you may be thankful for these interventions to allay your malaise or even save your life, again, you might not give much thought to how these miracle procedures came to be. Well, you have biomedical research to thank for it all.
The U.S. has been THE leader in biomedical research on planet earth. This is not disputable. America has invested money, talent, and effort into countless medical breakthroughs, expansion of biologic knowledge, and translation into medical care. These efforts came about thanks to public funding of research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, and other government agencies. The improvement in human health over decades can be directly attributed to the knowledge gained through research. YOU have been a partner in all these discoveries through the taxes we all pay. However, you're getting a pretty good return on your investment. In its most recent annual assessment, United for Medical Research estimated that each $1 NIH spent on research generated $2.56 in economic activity. Leadership in biomedical research has been one of the many things that has made and continues to make America great! However, today modern biomedical research is under attack.
The current administration seems to believe science is rife with bias, wasteful spending, pushes specific political ideology or agendas, and does not serve the public good. While I would never say things is scientific research are perfect (who can say that of anything?) the general description this administration paints is far from the truth. Who am I to say this? I have spent over forty years working in science starting as a student worker and working my way up to being faculty at a major university. I'm not the best scientist in the world nor am I the worst (at least I hope not!). I've made my contributions over the years working in the area of diabetes and obesity and hope my small contributions move us that much closer to finding cures for these conditions. But, our march towards those cures has now been significantly impeded by what's going on today.
My various comments in the coming posts will be done from the perspective of working with the NIH, because NIH-based funding forms the bulk of my research support and is what I am most familiar with. However, much of what will get discussed pretty much applies to other funding entities within the U.S. government. Private funders can be using totally different models from what I'm describing here.
Our first topic will be "overhead." This refers to costs related to supporting scientific research at various academic and non-academic institutions. Each institution negotiates an overhead rate with the NIH to help support research activities at their institution. These rates vary from institution to institution, because of various factors and the final negotiated rates have a very wide range. An example of why rates might vary include whether an institution gets support from state government that might support the same activity. Private universities typically do not receive state support and therefore may negotiate a higher overhead rate. Overhead is critical to the performance of research, because it funds the necessary scaffolding that supports research. Some of that framework is sometimes mandated, but not directly funded, by NIH and other funding agencies.
When I write a grant, the funds I receive are to support the actual research. My grant funds salaries for myself, my staff, and my students, the actual research, purchasing of necessary equipment, and ancillary things like costs related to publishing our work and travel to scientific conferences. But what about all the other things I need to do my research that are not directly covered by my grant? I need the following things specifically to do my research, some of which are mandated by the NIH and others are basic needs (other researchers may have different needs):
- I need physical space for me, my staff, and my students. That space needs water, lighting, electricity, heating/cooling, sanitation, and phone/internet.
- The university needs staff to maintain the space; clean and take out the trash, perform maintenance, etc.
- I need administrative support to help generate and submit my grant, but also manage the grant if I am lucky to receive one. The latter includes budget management, ordering of supplies, and other administrative activities
- My proposed research needs to be reviewed and approved by my institution's Institutional Review Board (IRB), a committee of scientists and non-scientists that reviews all research protocols for safety and ethics. Approval from the IRB is necessary in order to receive funding. If you want to learn more about the importance of the IRB, Wikipedia has a good description.
- My proposed research needs to be performed in a clinically-approved research space. Since I'm doing clinical research (research on humans), the space we use to perform our studies needs to have appropriate staffing, e.g., nurses, pharmacists, along with adequate equipment and support in case of emergencies.
- I perform DXA scans (you probably know this as a bone density scan) in our research, which involve X-rays. So my research protocol has to be approved by the Radiation Safety Office to ensure the safety of our study participants.
- I need space for the freezers that will store the biological samples we collect for our research. That space needs electricity, internet (for the freezer alarm system), and climate control.
I'm sure I'm missing one or two other items, but you should get the sense of the immense support structure that surrounds the kind of research I do. The support structure varies by research type, so most institutions need to maintain a wide spectrum of services to maintain excellent research programs. Thus, our institution provides a wide range of support for biomedical research, all of which are covered, in part, by the overhead charged on grants....not the actual research grant. You'll see the distinction below.
The proposal to cap the overhead rate on all NIH grants to 15% is extremely misguided. The negotiated overhead rate at my institution is 65%, which means the institution would be losing a very significant chunk of change that helps pay for the various services I described above (and more). I know overhead rates at other institutions can run as low as 30% and as high as 90%, so the hit each institution would take would vary. These funds cannot be easily replaced and therefore will force cutbacks in these services. This means a significant deterioration in our country's biomedical research enterprise.
I have heard several Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) functionaries give the same explanation as to why the cap of 15% would be good for research (same argument is pushed by the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025). The example goes like this. Let's say an investigator gets a grant for $100 and let's say the overhead rate at their institution is 40%. That means the investigator gets $60 and the institution gets $40. However, under the new proposal, the institution would only get $15 and the investigator would get $85 and therefore more money is going to the actual research. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? But, this ignores two major issues. First, under their scenario, there is now less money to support all those services I described above. How are all of those services going to be paid? Second, their description is not how NIH overhead works. Using their same scenario, if an investigator writes a grant for $100, $100 goes to the research. The overhead of $40 is added on top of the research funds, such that the total grant award is $140. So, under their proposal to cap overhead to 15%, the investigator still gets $100, but the institution now only get $15. There is not one extra penny going to the research!
The other aspect of this DOGE fairy tale is where all the savings are actually going. If overhead is capped at 15%, that means the NIH budget will now have a chunk of uncommitted funds. I have not heard a single word about where that money will be directed. Nobody has said that the overhead savings would be diverted to increasing the number of research grants or to seed new research initiatives. In fact, the overall proposal is to cut the NIH budget by 40%. Therefore, there will be less funding for research, which makes the DOGE explanation an even greater fairy tale.
The other argument put forth by DOGE is that private funders typically have overhead rates that are around 15% and if those groups can fund at 15%, so should everyone else. Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that the funding base for private funders is very low (because it's mostly donation driven) and if they applied a regular overhead rate, their ability to fund research projects would be severely limited. Additionally, given their funding base is so low, they would not be able to sustain the levels of funding needed to maintain the research support structure. This DOGE argument is akin to saying that small countries are able to maintain armed forces at a fraction of what the U.S. spends, therefore the U.S. should cap defense spending at some average similar to what smaller countries spend.The reality is that biomedical research we have done and continue to do has many intangible positives that cannot be directly put into dollars on a ledger. The significant strides in health and medical care have made significant improvement to quality of life for everyone across the globe, not just Americans. However, taking away those dollar and cents will significantly deteriorate our progress and will likely degrade livelihoods and quality of life. A real discussion regarding overhead rates might be appropriate, given the desire for efficiency and the ever increasing cost of doing research. However, capping overhead rates to a uniform arbitrary figure that has no basis in reality, is not a solution to what may not be a problem.
#DrWattAtUSC #LetsMakeAmericaBuenoAgain