Systemic flaws in the way biomedical research is conducted in the United States have created a “creeping malaise in the midst of the bounty of discovery and success,” the director of the National Cancer Institute said Friday at a University of Michigan symposium.
“The system we’ve created is powerful but vulnerable” and unsustainable, largely because there are “too many people pursuing too little money” in the form of research grants from the National Institutes of Health, said Nobel laureate and former NIH Director Dr. Harold Varmus.
He joined five U-M faculty researchers in a panel discussion about the future of the $100 billion-a-year U.S. biomedical research enterprise. The 90-minute symposium at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business was one of two that preceded Friday’s inauguration of Mark S. Schlissel as U-M’s 14th president.
Varmus invited the other panel members to suggest ways to balance the roles of government and universities with the aspirations of young biomedical scientists embarking on careers.
Panel member Huda Akil, the Gardner Quarton Distinguished University Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and co-director of the U-M Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, agreed that changes are needed but said it’s critical to “preserve the passion” that drives young scientists to pursue new knowledge.
“You don’t want to kill the heart, the passion, that really fuels the risk-taking behavior” behind significant discoveries,” she said.
In his comments Friday and in a recent article he co-authored in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Varmus said the imbalance between available funding and the still-growing U.S. biomedical science community has created a hypercompetitive atmosphere in which scientific productivity is reduced and promising careers are threatened.
Varmus and his co-authors recommended, among other things, that the number of entrants into doctoral programs in the biomedical sciences gradually be reduced in the United States and that some students be guided into non-research careers.
Anna Mapp, a research professor at the Life Sciences Institute and director of U-M’s program in chemical biology, said she looks forward to a world in which young people entering non-science professions have a solid grounding in the sciences.
Computational biologist Gonçalo Abecasis, the Felix Moore Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at the School of Public Health, said it is important not to paint all disciplines with the same broad brush when discussing the problems facing biomedical research.
“While some fields have reached a saturation point — like a pyramid scheme that can’t go on forever — other fields, like computational biology, don’t have that problem,” Abecasis said.
Dr. David Ginsburg, a research professor at the Life Sciences Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, said there is a heavy emphasis at NIH on funding “translational research” with obvious connections to medicine, at the expense of fundamental studies that provide deep insights into basic biological processes. At the same time, there seems to be a decline in the number of physician-scientists, he said.
“It’s not easy to figure out how we’re going to maintain this constituency in the biomedical work force,” said Ginsburg, the James V. Neel Distinguished University Professor of Internal Medicine and Human Genetics and a physician whose lab studies the blood-clotting system.
In the U.S. system of biomedical research, NIH grants help support legions of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who do most of the hands-on work in university labs. This “training pipeline” produces more scientists than the field can absorb, resulting in an unsupportable mismatch between supply and demand.
Douglas C. Noll, the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Professor of Biomedical Engineering, said that before the current system is scrapped, a new funding mechanism must be introduced to replace it.
