The NIH funding crunch has opened up debates about the best way of giving out dwindling funds and how to solve the problem of over competition in biomedical science. Nature this week weighs in with a rather provocative commentary about the excessive number of biomedical scientists. It argues that the NIH funding structures encourages more people to get into biomedical research, without any good feedback loops, which exacerbates the problem of too much competition for funding. Solution? Wean senior researchers off of the “NIH dole” to make room for the young ones with the groundbreaking ideas. Have the universities pay for the salaries of the senior scientists and get them to teach more. “This won’t be easy” the commentary says. Yeah, I’d say.

An editorial also in this week’s Nature says the system of peer review at the NIH needs an overhaul. The NIH has recently solicited ideas for how to make it more efficient, given the deluge of grant applications. The editorial suggests that for example shorter applications and more ‘bridge’ funding would be good ideas.

The Scientist has a commentary questioning whether the doubling of the NIH budget led to a commensurate increase in research productivity in the US. Well, the number of publications in the biosciences from US labs did increase during the NIH boom years, but so did the number from non-US labs. But then again, is the number of publications the best indicator of productivity? Readers have posted comments on the piece.

And finally, Geoff Davis, a mathematician who did the Sigma Xi Postdoc Survey a couple of years back and who speaks out on postdoc issues, recently compared the NIH’s efforts to encourage more postdoc mentoring with the NSF’s initiative. Geoff is pretty critical of the NIH on this on his blog. According to his interpretation of the statements from the two organizations on mentoring, the NSF requires PIs to mentor their postdocs and to document it, while the NIH says PIs can, but not too much. One of the issues is that most postdocs are funded by research grants, not training grants (even though the NIH defines postdocs as trainees) so any career development stuff they want to do has to be done on their own time.