Action Potential

Tuesday thoughts

Today was the fourth day of SFN 2006, and I find myself seriously frustrated with the setup of the meeting this year – there seems to have been little to no thought put into where to schedule the various concurrent sessions. Usually there are multiple slide sessions each morning or afternoon that are of interest. The natural thing to do is to skip back and forth between sessions to catch the most interesting talks, but here in Atlanta this is all but impossible given the distance separating even closely related sessions. The Atlanta convention center consists of three connected buildings, each of which has multiple levels connected with escalators. It takes a good 10 minutes to walk from Building B to Building C, and yet sessions that are fairly similar in focus are routinely allocated to different buildings. On Sunday the session on objects and faces (mostly fMRI of the ventral pathway) was in B and one on extrastriate visual cortex was in C, as was a session on attention. No doubt most of the people interested in one of these sessions would have been interested in the others, and yet it was all but impossible to go back and forth. This has happened to me every day thusfar. Many of the scientists here have expressed a similar frustration. The problem would be easy to remedy – someone just needs to put related sessions in nearby rooms. The room assignments, as far as I can tell, are totally random, which has detracted from the meeting.

This afternoon featured a well attended talk on the current funding woes, given by the heads of the various agencies of the NIH (the NIH director was supposed to give it, but his flight was delayed). The talk focused on explaining why we are currently experiencing a funding crunch in the US, and attempted to highlight what the NIH folks say are widespread misconceptions about NIH funding. The increased competition for funds has apparently been mostly driven by an increase in grant applications (rather than a funneling of resources to more clinically oriented research), fuled in part by a boom investments in the biomedical sciences by universities. New facilities have brought with them new jobs, and there are now many more people applying for grants. NIH funding doubled between 1998 and 2002, but has leveled off since then, so supply has not kept pace with demand. Tom Insel stressed that they are still committed to basic research; apparently the proportion of directly translational research they fund has not increased. He did not address the issue that most of the scientists I know are interested in – whether basic research grants need to explain how the research might ultimately benefit human health in some way. There was a Q&A session at the end that I had to skip out on, so perhaps someone queried him about this. They did offer some encouragement, citing previous periods when funding dried up and funding rates were as low as 10%, and explaining how grants that are ending now will free up uncommitted funds for new grants. They also concluded by stating the need to better explain the importance of the NIH to the public (apparently only 10% even know what the NIH is).

Comments

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    Shane Lee said:

    It was my understanding that the NIH was trying to stay true to some sort of original mission statement that focused more on science with an overt clinical goal.

    It seems that their support of “basic science” goes only so far as one can justify the research in terms of something that could overtly affect human health.

    And while this sounds very altruistic and honestly not unreasonable, I stand firm in my belief that basic research sciences are actually a more direct route to true understanding and potential treatment than work that is narrowed in its focus.