Scientists are among the most enthusiastic people when it comes to talking about their
work. Despite this, it seems that it is the funding system that Canadian scientists
most often discuss these days, and not their findings and new ideas. Needless to say,
research can only exist with good and secure funding, but when obtaining funding becomes
a dominant part of investigators’ activity, the system has a problem. I am a cell
biologist and physiologist recruited to Canada from Hungary. Generous funding helped
me to complete my post-doctoral training here and to start my own lab a decade ago.
The transition from post-doc was smoothened by one of the last Canadian Institutes
of Health Research (CIHR) Senior Research Fellowships that gave 2 years of post-doctoral
funding and 2 years of new investigator salary support. I was extremely lucky to have
this opportunity, which is no longer available to current post-docs. However, as my
independent work started to produce results, I had to realize how difficult it was
to maintain even a modestly sized lab (one technician and two students) within a research
institute. As the reality of inevitable rejections of first grant renewal applications
set in, I was swept away by the struggle for funding and the never-ending cycles of
reviewing. This experience, shared by many of us, shaped my views on the ills of the
Canadian biomedical research funding system. I am sharing my thoughts on this important
and complex topic, with the hope that it will be part of a fruitful discussion.
The struggle for funding overtakes research
There is a general agreement that the funding system for biomedical research is broken.
In fact, many researchers would describe our current situation as a deep crisis. Although
we lack hard data to verify the darkening mood of the science community, we seem to
be losing the creative, idea-centred environment required for leading-edge science.
A common experience of many of us is a sense of hopelessness and bitterness due to
the non-stop struggle for funding, and the lack of fairness and predictability in
our professional lives. In fact, I have never before witnessed such desperation among
my colleagues during my 17 years in research in this country.
As recently pointed out by the Canadian Society for Molecular Biosciences in a letter
to the Minister of Industry, ‘the overwhelming majority of discovery research laboratories
critically depend on the very competitive and most innovative open operating grant
competitions’ [1]. As funding rates are falling, labs are underfunded, and the current
funding environment threatens the existence of many labs across the country. Even
well-established investigators, who have proven themselves excellent and productive
scientists, are just one failed renewal application away from a crisis due to disruption
in funding. High-quality research productivity no longer guarantees renewal of funding.
‘Publish or perish’ has been replaced by ‘publish AND perish’. As a result, we now
spend less time focusing on ideas and research itself, and more time applying for
funding. As I learned during my many cycles of resubmissions, enormous amount of resources
and brain power goes into preparing grants, generating preliminary data and addressing
often subjective requests from reviewers who might not even be in the committee to
read the resubmission.
The cycles of resubmissions waste financial and human resources, but in addition to
this, their detrimental effects on the psyche of all involved cannot be emphasized
enough. I spent unimaginable number of hours rewriting the same grant for resubmissions,
time I spent not doing research. Loss of time however was not the biggest problem.
As many of us will testify, nothing reduces scientific creativity more than the increasingly
desperate fight for funding, the inevitable soul-crushing rejections, and the constant
pressure from competition. There is nothing less motivating than writing and reviewing
grants, especially with the knowledge that the outcome more likely than not will be
a rejection. The constant grant competitions with unpredictable outcomes are a major
source of debilitating stress that crushes creative thinking. In addition, it is worth
noting that science is a collaborative endeavour, where the rocky road towards discovery
is best smoothened by sharing data instead of hiding them to protect one’s chances
for funding. Overall, our funding system is turning scientists into entrepreneurs
and managers, and forcing them into roles they have not trained for, never wanted
as a career, and which requires a very different mindset than doing science. I was
trained to be a scientist and Dragon’s den is not my world. Rules of the business
world cannot be applied to science.
Training is also an important task of research labs. The funding crunch victimizes
our trainees in more than one way. Students are facing a rapidly changing training
environment, as fewer researchers can afford to train graduate students. Those labs
that can still participate in training now rely too heavily on these inexperienced
but cheap members of the research community to perform cutting-edge science. Absence
in the labs of senior people, e.g. technicians and research associates who no longer
can be paid from average grants, reduces the quality of both training and research,
slows progress, and forces students into roles they often cannot fulfil. This is a
fact well known to anyone who has tried to finish promising research projects with
inexperienced students. Finally, who will be the next generation of researchers? Academia
has lost its appeal and our struggles will hardly make our trainees want to follow
in our footsteps.
How did we get to this point?
There are two sides to this problem: stagnating funding, that has to support an increasing
number of excellent labs, and a major shift in funding philosophy affecting existing
labs. In the past decades, biomedical research yielded amazing results and the number
of excellent research groups exploded in Canada. Unimaginable technical advances and
the fast growth of the biotech industry that supports experimental research widened
the scope and potential of research but also increased expenses. Despite these factors,
in the past years, funding stagnated, leading to plummeting funding rates and a sharp
fall in the value of individual grants. For example, the latest transitional operating
grant competition of CIHR not only yielded an unprecedentedly low funding rate (below
15 %), but also saw a 27 % budget cut for every awarded grant. This hit especially
hard, since in the past 2 years, we had only one competition per year instead of the
previous two. The decrease in inflation-adjusted value of the Canadian Research and
Development expenditures is well demonstrated by Chakma et al. who explored global
trends in research funding during the period of 2007–2012 [2]. Their data show a negative
growth in spending in Canada, the USA and Europe, which was in sharp contrast to the
huge growth in Asia, most notably in China.
Along with stagnating funding, there is an ongoing shift in the funding philosophy,
as demonstrated by the changing policies and funding priorities of CIHR and Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Especially problematic from my
viewpoint is the rapidly decreasing appreciation of curiosity-driven fundamental research.
The current trend rewards applied research and knowledge translation at the expense
of basic science and highly rates projects with potential for commercialization, i.e.
immediate ‘results’ and industry relevance. In contrast, projects that aim for a better
understanding of fundamental mechanisms are increasingly out of favour. A second trend
is that large portions of funding are directed towards selected research priorities,
further reducing funding for investigator-initiated projects. As a result, applications
that received lower ranking from review panels are funded based on their topic, with
the danger that relevance takes precedent over quality. Yet another trend is that
money is directed towards large labs and mega-projects, while starving many smaller
labs.
These shifts that tilt the balance of funding are based on a few false beliefs. One
such idea is that science is slow in benefitting society because academic researchers
are reluctant to translate our knowledge. Accordingly, only an emphasis on translational
research will stop scientists from doing ‘useless’ research for the sake of research
itself and speed the application of discoveries to prevent and treat disease. However,
the history of science tells a different story, as leading scientists continue to
point out (e.g. [3–5]). In an excellent essay, David Botstein of Princeton University
argues that great advances in biomedical science are the direct result of work by
thousands of basic scientists whose primary goal was to understand fundamental mechanisms
of biology [4]. It cannot be emphasized enough that basic science generates the discoveries
that form the basis for translation. Thus, basic and translational science are complementary.
As a powerful editorial in the journal Infection and Immunity puts it, ‘support for
translational research must be accompanied by a robust investment in basic science,
which provides the essential raw material for translation and continues to represent
humanity’s best hope to meet a wide range of public health challenges’ [5]. Is it
possible that the already accumulated knowledge is adequate to solve all diseases
if we put more effort in translating? When considering this question, we must remember
that knowing facts does not equal a deep and adequate understanding of mechanisms,
something that is a prerequisite for successful translation. Thus, in the absence
of good understanding of many processes in nature, the answer to this question is
no. Despite this, applications aiming at mechanistic understanding of important processes
with no immediate disease relevance stand little chance of funding.
A second false belief is that major steps can only come from large projects, while
smaller groups are useless and not worth supporting. The truth is that discoveries
can come from anywhere, and only a broad base of well-funded researchers can provide
the environment and culture that will promote the creativity of and innovation by
all participants. Interestingly, the need of a wide base of participants is well accepted
in sports, where politicians and the public agree that we must support a large population
of talents so some of them can reach the podium. This requirement is true for science
too, with the important difference that in research, there are no winners and losers.
Science does not move forward through large breakthroughs generated by isolated research
groups (winners reaching the podium). Instead, main steps are due to increments provided
by years and years of painstaking, slow work by many groups and slowly accumulating
knowledge achieved through a multitude of failures [6].
What about peer review?
Peer review was implemented to assure quality control and fairness. Contrary to its
intended role, our current system is full of bias and greatly opposes risk taking
and outside-the-box thinking, major attributes of leading-edge science. The problems
of peer review were discussed in detail by Wheeldon and Gordon [7]. The ultimate goal
of review is to select good projects with a high likelihood of success. But there
is an inherent contradiction: due to the nature of scientific discovery, there is
no good way of predicting which idea will work, which hypothesis will prove correct.
Contrary, the more novel an idea is, the higher the chance that peer review will reject
it as too risky.
Since funding decisions must be made; peer review increasingly relies on ‘objective
measures’ including preliminary data and metrics to predict success. The requirement
to support all aspects of a proposal by preliminary data is out of control. Significant
portions of existing grants are now spent on generating data for the next grant. Due
to the low funding rates, a large percentage of these data will never be further extended
and published. The cycle of writing and reviewing mostly rejected applications leads
to ballooning costs, money spent on nothing. Gordon and Poulin convincingly demonstrated
how wasteful the peer review system is [8]. Using data from 2007, they estimated that
the costs of preparing an NSERC discovery grant and its rejection by peer review ($40,000)
exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator directly an average baseline
discovery grant of $30,000. The amount of an average grant is usually higher at other
agencies, but the requirements for expensive preliminary data are also more substantial.
As a consequence of falling success rates, the system is clearly overwhelmed by the
increasing number of applications, a large proportion of which are excellent and would
deserve funding. Reviewers are facing an almost impossible task of selecting the few
winners from the large pool of excellent grants. They are often asked to assess projects
in which they are not content experts, further increasing error.
To do the job, we are becoming overly critical, picky and unreasonable. Overall, reviewing
is becoming an increasingly impossible and stressful job that unsurprisingly quickly
leads to burnout. For applicants, lack of quality control and transparency in the
review process is a huge issue. There is no mechanism to protest against mistakes
and there is no accountability in the system. Addressing issues raised by reviewers
does not guarantee a better ranking for the resubmitted grant, leading to endless
cycles of resubmissions.
Since prior productivity is viewed as a good indicator for future success, much emphasis
is put on this aspect when assessing applicants. For this, committees increasingly
rely on metrics, but the use of these is problematic. This is a larger topic that
I cannot address here in detail, so I will only mention one example: journal impact
factors were not designed for the purpose of assessing the quality of applicants’
papers. The Declaration on Research Assessments (DORA) that was endorsed by a multitude
of leading scientists and scientific organizations intends to reduce biases and inaccuracies
when evaluating research by halting the practice of correlating the journal impact
factor to the merits of a specific scientist’s contributions [9].
What are the solutions?
There are no obvious, easy solutions for such a complex issue as improving the funding
system. CIHR is currently undergoing a major overhaul, and other agencies, including
the Kidney Foundation of Canada, are also changing their application process to improve
peer review. It is too early to know the effects of these changes. An honest assessment
and a better conversation between agencies and the research community will be vital.
Importantly, improving the system will require not only more money, but also a rethinking
of funding philosophy and peer review. Reform should aim at reducing the counterproductive
struggle for funding. Increased funding security for some well-established researchers
through the new CIHR foundation scheme is a good step. But with its long evaluation
times and low funding rates, it leaves many outstanding applicants in an unfair funding
limbo for extended periods of time. Without better funding for the project scheme,
the system will also leave a large portion of labs unfunded. The balance also appears
to be tilting further towards translation at the expense of discovery research, a
trend that will ultimately be detrimental for innovation. Finally, eliminating face-to-face
meetings will save money, but will also remove an important quality control step and
thus will reduce fairness.
One possible solution could be to decrease the reliance of researchers on the grant
system. Support provided by institutions could increase funding security. Quality
control can be maintained by the careful selection process through which institutes
hire the best researchers. Funding researchers and not specific projects can promote
risk taking.
In summary, supporting a broad variety of research including basic and translational
projects and a large cohort of committed researchers is of utmost importance and is
the best way to generate an environment of innovation and translation, something that
will surely benefit all Canadians.