VOLUME 30 , NUMBER 1 -January 1999

Investing in the future

By Richard McCarty
Executive Director for Science

I don't wish to rekindle nightmares for any of you. However, think back just a few short years ago when the chances of having a grant proposal funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were just slightly better than winning a $100 million Powerball jackpot. The low probability of funding was especially evident for grant proposals in the behavioral and social sciences. I know from talking to many friends and colleagues and from my own experiences just how demoralizing it was to work for many months in developing a grant proposal only to receive the bad news that the priority score was not sufficiently high to warrant funding.

Indeed, many members of NIH study sections knew that no more than a small number of grant proposals would be funded in a given round even though many were of high quality. The cutoff for funding was well below the tenth percentile and the bleak mood permeated all aspects of the process. Those fortunate few who received the good news of a funded grant were often in departments where many of their colleagues were stuck in the vicious cycle of revise and re-submit. Even when a grant was funded, the final budget was often reduced significantly below the recommended level of funding. This made completing the experiments described in the proposal difficult if not impossible.

How many great ideas went lacking because grant funding was so tight? How many budding careers were adversely affected because young scholars were unable to get their first grant funded? How many senior investigators had their research plans short-circuited because of an interruption in funding?

That was then, this is now

The NIH budget for the past several years has been increasing at a rate well above inflation and grants have been funded in the fifteenth to twentieth percentile range. While this is not exactly the kind of news that causes one to break dance in the hallways of the Academy, it has been a very encouraging sign to junior and senior investigators as well as graduate students in training. Despite these encouraging developments, no one was prepared for the dramatic turn of events on Capitol Hill when a House-Senate conference committee approved a 14.7 percent increase in the NIH budget for the current fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 1998. This translates into a $2 billion increase in the total NIH budget. Excuse me, but did someone say $2 billion-as in billion with a 'B'? Science advocacy groups, including our own APA Science Policy Office, are trying to make this a trend for the future by calling upon Congress to double the NIH budget within 5 years.

This spectacular increase in NIH funding will benefit a host of behavioral and social science research efforts. These include new research centers at the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, an expanded Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and an increased commitment to prevention sciences programs at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the National Cancer Institute and the Office of AIDS Research.

The investment in research made by the 105th Congress was not limited to the NIH budget. Congress also approved healthy budget increases for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation, among others. This is a remarkable time and it would be nice to savor the good feelings. However, now the hard work begins.

Repaying the investment

The federal government has made an extraordinary investment in biomedical and behavioral research with the funding increases for fiscal year 1999. Behavioral and social scientists must rise to the occasion and generate impressive numbers of high-quality grant applications. Now is the time to think about new and innovative training programs for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and large collaborative center grants. Many of you have an opportunity to explore new options for funding in institutes and programs that have had little previous investment in behavioral and social science research. Explore the NIH web site at www.nih.gov on a regular basis for new research initiatives that will be announced in the coming months.

Efforts have been made for many years to promote the value to the nation of studying behavior. Those advocacy efforts have the potential to bear fruit, but only if academic and research psychologists complete the circle by generating the next wave of great ideas.

I have one final thing to say as we start the New Year. Psychological scientists, please start your research engines!

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