At a time when young biomedical faculty are being hit hard by the NIH’s continuing flat budget, it seems some 200 researchers are doing quite well funding-wise, each receiving six or more grants last year. My colleagues on the news team of Nature have done an analysis of NIH data about all the grants handed out by the agency, including training grants, grants for organizing conferences/meetings and those for multi-PI collaborations.

A few of these grant winners quoted in the Nature story said that successful, productive labs should be allowed to earn as many grants as they can. One PI from MGH, Bruce Rosen, who received 8 NIH grants in 2007, was quoted in the Globe’s health blog saying that only one of his 8 grants was an individual investigator one. Others are training grants and more collaborative ones shared by other PIs. Senior PIs, he told the Globe, tend to be involved in lots of projects and centers.

I’m glad that reporters are looking deeper into where these grants are going and to whom, especially now with growing concern that young scientists unable to break into the NIH “club” are leaving academic science.

What I want to know is what percentage of all grants given out are renewals versus grants given to first-time applicants and how that has changed over time (we know that first-time applicants have a lower success rate in getting grants from the NIH than more seasoned researchers). Do those numbers exist out there? I’ll try to look around but if you’ve seen such numbers, please post a link here. If we’re seeing that a growing proportion of grants doled out are renewals, then that should be worth talking about.

I also wonder what the average number of renewals is for individual PIs. Has that number gone up or down over time?

Expect to see more discussion about this when the NIH announces changes to its peer review system this spring. We’ll see if the NIH decides to limit the number of grants each PI can receive each year.