The US National Institutes of Health is divided into an Extramural Program (EP), where scientists in universities and research labs apply for grants, and an Intramural Program (IP), where investigators such as myself are provided with a budget to do research without having to write grants. Intramural Investigators are reviewed fairly rigorously every four years, which affects budgets for the next four years, but this is less stressful than trying to run a lab on NIH grants. This funding model difference is particularly salient in the face of budget cuts because for the IP a 10% cut is 10% cut whereas for the EP, it means that 10% fewer grants are funded. When a lab cannot renew a grant, people lose their jobs. This problem is further exacerbated by medical schools loading up with “soft money” positions, where researchers must pay their own salaries from grants. The institutions also extract fairly large indirect costs from these grants, so in essence, the investigators write grants to both pay their salaries and fill university coffers. I often nervously joke that since the IP is about 10% of the NIH budget, an easy way to implement a 10% budget cut is to eliminate the IP.
However, I think there is value in having something like the IP where people have the financial security to take some risks. It is the closet thing we have these days to the old Bell Labs, where the transistor, information theory, C, and Unix were invented. The IP has produced 18 Nobel Prizes and can be credited with breaking the genetic code (Marshall Nirenberg), the discovery of fluoride to prevent tooth decay, lithium for bipolar disorder, and vaccines against multiple diseases (see here for a list of past accomplishments). What the IP needs to ensure its survival is a more a rigorous and transparent procedure for entry into the IP where the EP participates. An IP position should be treated like a lifetime grant to which anyone at any stage in their career can apply. Not everyone may want to be here. Research groups are generally smaller and there are lots of rules and regulations to deal with, particularly for travel. But if someone just wants to close their door and do high risk high reward research, this is a pretty good place to be and they should get a shot at it.
The Stadtman Tenure-track Investigator program is a partial implementation of this idea. For the past five years, the IP has conducted institute-wide searches to identify young talent in a broad set of fields. I am co-chair of the Computational Biology search this year. We have invited five candidates to come to a “Stadtman Symposium”, which will be held tomorrow at NIH. Details are here along with all the symposia. Candidates that strike the interest of individual scientific directors of the various institutes will be invited back for a more traditional interview. Most of the hires at NIH over the past five years have been through the Stadtman process. I think this has been a good idea and has brought some truly exceptional people to the IP. What I would do to make it even more transparent is to open up the search to people at all stages in the their career and to have EP people participate in the searches and eventual selection of the investigators.
