The Markey Scholars Conference Proceedings (2004) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Future of Non-profit Funding in Biomedical Research
3 The Future of Non-profit Funding in Biomedical Research
Pages 13-23
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From page 13... ...
In 2001, this amounted to about $515 million for medical research, $100 million for grant programs, and the remainder for administrative and other incidental costs. The grant expenditures are spread across a number of programs, including support for undergraduate science education in the United States, biomedical research in a number of 13
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From page 14... ...
The primary mission of HHMI is to fund and advance basic biomedical research in the United States. Our challenge was to determine the best way to use this additional money.
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From page 15... ...
We began to examine issues that are particular to the current American biomedical research enterprise. First, there is a lack of places for scientists who want to continue to work in the lab with their own hands.
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From page 16... ...
You have to hire people, fire people, evaluate individuals, motivate people, recruit graduate students, lure postdocs to your lab, and deal with their personal problems. Some people who would function extremely well as research
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From page 17... ...
I do not enjoy them, whereas I find research most enjoyable and rewarding." "Of the three main activities involved in scientific research, thinking, talking and doing, I much prefer the last and am probably best at it. I am all right at thinking, but not much good at the talking." "`Doing' for a scientist implies doing experiments, and I managed to work in the laboratory as my main occupation from when I started as a Ph.D.
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From page 18... ...
Most assistant professors probably spend 30, 40, or maybe as much as 50 percent of their time not on their own scientific research, but dealing with their grants, classroom teaching, worrying about hiring support staff, and worrying about other issues. Such an environment might enable scientists to succeed while spending only 50 hours a week doing their research, rather than needing an 80-hour workweek, because we eliminated 30 hours of activities that are not directly related to their research or to interacting productively with their colleagues.
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From page 19... ...
We expect a core of about 180 resident scientists and then about 120 support staff providing services ranging from the cleaning of glassware, to tissue culture to sophisticated machine shops. We will reserve about 100 spaces for visiting scientists who will work, fully funded, for periods of 3 weeks to 3 years, while retaining their primary appointment at their host institution.
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From page 20... ...
Indeed, our view is that people will not spend their whole career at the institution we will establish. We anticipate recruiting half a dozen senior scientists to provide mentorship and leadership, and those people might arrive midway in their careers and complete them here.
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From page 21... ...
While it helps to have a great computer science department on campus because my graduate students can take the programming classes necessary to do bioinformatics, in my experience the computer scientists are not really interested in our problems. Computer scientists have their own career structure, and the reward structure in universities penalizes interdisciplinary research.
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From page 22... ...
While a number of universities are developing interdisciplinary programs, there are still many problems. Until recently, the development of bioinformatics in academia was crippled because the computer scientists did not consider bioinformatics to be real computer science and the biologists did not think bioinformatics was real biology.
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From page 23... ...
I think it would be good for some of this work to return to the public sector. We hope to facilitate this by providing the kind of funding, team work, and technical support that you find now in good biotech companies, but not in the universities.
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