The_20Scientist_20March_202019 (1)

03.2019 | THE SCIENTIST 59

How to distribute money more fairly

across age groups is a question that sev-

eral funding bodies have grappled with

over the years. According to McDowell,

the European Research Council has set a

good example by creating separate fund-

ing schemes for early-, mid-, and late-

career investigators. That way, you’re

comparing “peer with peer, rather than

comparing a 70-year-old professor at

Harvard Med who has 40 years of papers

and track records to a 35-year-old new

investigator,” he says.

The NIH has gone back and forth on

the issue for years. In 2013, the agency

floated the idea of an “emeritus award” to

help senior investigators in the process

of winding down their research, But the

proposal drew criticism from research-

ers who perceived it as a way to chan-

nel even more money to older investiga-

tors. In 2017, the newly proposed Grant

Support Index (GSI), which would have

capped the number of grants an indi-

vidual can receive, was scrapped after

one month, again in response to con-

cerns voiced by the research community.

Instead, the NIH decided to put about

3 percent of its budget towards grants

for early- and mid-career investigators,

as part of the so-called Next Generation

Researchers Initiative.

Tilghman says that one of her main

concerns is the potential impact of this

hypercompetition on innovation in sci-

ence. “What I often hear from my junior

colleagues is, you won’t get funded if

you’re proposing something that looks at

all risky,” she explains. The system favors

proposals that can guarantee results but

will only move a field forward incremen-

tally, rather than potentially propelling it

into new, uncharted territory. The NIH

has tried to address this issue by creating

the New Innovator Awards (DP2), which

reward early-career researchers with

innovative proposals. But these need to

be scaled up, Tilghman says. “There are

simply not enough of them.”

For now, the main beneficiaries of

such initiatives are younger research-

ers. Often, this leaves mid-career

I am concerned that if we’re increasingly supporting an

aging scientifi c workforce, that we may risk losing part

of a generation of younger researchers and innovators.

 —Bruce Weinberg, Ohio State University

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