Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
APPENDIX D 35 mentors were often the best teachers because of the obvious joy they took in their subjects. It is particularly important to encourage women and minority students to continue with math and science courses. Social gatherings and clubs are useful in disseminating the idea that a career in science is possible for anyone. A directory of available science and math scholarships would be very useful, if such a thing does not already exist. Once committed to a scientific career, trainees are very dependent upon senior staff mentors. A good mentor will critique work, teach new techniques, maintain high ethical standards and encourage a young career. Unfortunately, not all laboratory managers or department heads are perfect, and problems do occur. The National Research Council might consider requiring yearly plans for the training of young scientists to ensure money is being appropriately spent and that educational plans are sound. Another option would be to hold yearly conferences at which trainees would present their work. In this way, young investigators would gain experience in presentation, be critiqued by their peers, make personal connections in the science fields, and gain some prestige at their home universities. At the same time, NRC representatives could assess the quality of work presented and identify problem institutions or individuals. During the past few years, it has become difficult to decipher scientific literature. Everyone seems to be using a different type of statistics and jargon. In the cost and result conscious environment of the next century, this will not be tolerated. Writing and communication skills must be taught so that trainees will be effective in competing for grant money and in getting their work published and understood. This could be accomplished by required courses in college or graduate school and also be included in a national workshop format. With the coming reforms in health care and the planned reductions in funding of basic science research, we must ensure that women professionals are not economic casualties. In my department we have one extra physician than strictly needed to cover for maternity and paternity leaves in addition to scientific meetings and vacations. It is our view that raising children is desirable as well as necessary, and we plan accordingly. It would be terrible to see promising careers derailed because of conflicts between the ever increasing pressure to publish and produce and family needs. Department heads need to be aware of the value of their female colleagues and do their best to support their careers. STATEMENT BY SUSAN A. GERBI, Ph.D. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the impact of National Research Service Awards (NRSA) on the training needs of our country. This is an area of interest to me, having served on the NIH study section for training grants in Genetics a dozen years ago, and I have been serving as the Program Director of the NIH training grant in Molecular and Cell Biology at Brown University for the past decade. Also, as President of the American Society for Cell Biology, I have an interest in the issue of research and training. It is now many years since I served as a member of your Committee, and I note that the basic questions being addressed never change, and the answers are still somewhat elusive! In the current climate of trimming budgets to reduce the federal deficit, Congress is sure to view the NRSA program in a critical fashion, and the report of your Committee is extremely important for continuation of the NRSA program at current levels. I will confine my remarks to the biological sciences, with emphasis on the subfields of cell and molecular biology with which I am most familiar. Why should the biological sciences be singled out for special federal support of research training, unlike many other disciplines? It is important to attract students into careers in biomedical research as the future manpower for our nation to insure that research advances continue to be made to reduce human disease and reduce the cost of health care. Therefore, this training area is one of national need that deserves special funding, thus setting it apart from other disciplines. Students attracted to this area have the career options of obtaining a Ph.D. and doing research, or obtaining an M.D. for clinical practice. Salaries for medical doctors are much higher than for Ph.D. researchers. Also, there is much greater job security for medical doctors. Given these facts, one would expect the brightest students to go to medical school rather than graduate school, and indeed this is often the
APPENDIX D 36 case. Predoctoral fellowships are bait to try to lure gifted students into a research career. What are the future manpower needs of our country in the biological sciences? For the past few years it has been claimed that there is about a 1:1 correspondence of Ph.D. production and job opportunities. It was anticipated that a wave of retirements of faculty in academia would begin in the 1990s, creating a need for their replacement. With a change in retirement policies on the age for retirement, this wave may begin somewhat later in this decade than projected but I do not think the initial projection will be far off (most faculty whom I know are still choosing to retire at age 65). However, the end of the baby boom reaching college age means that there are fewer applicants. This coupled with the tight economy and reducing federal support for educational institutions (e.g., decreased indirect cost recovery) means that many colleges and universities are reducing the number of faculty slots to be filled. Another career opportunity that has increased dramatically in the past decade is in the biotechnology industry. However, most of these companies are still in the R&D mode, with few products yet marketable. In our lean economy, most of these companies are suffering, as can be seen by their stock values which have plummeted. Thus, the picture is not one of major growth of job opportunities in this area either. Your Committee should acquire statistics to see if my impression of decreased job growth in academia and industry is real. Also you will need to wrestle with the unknown outcome of how this may change if the economy rebounds. The scenario I have painted suggests there is a current Ph.D. overproduction. Indeed, talented postdoctorals at some of our top schools are lined up in a holding pattern, waiting for a good job amid fierce competition. On the other hand, there is enormous promise of exciting applications of biological research in medicine, agriculture, and other areas of our society, and one could argue that the field is ripe for further expansion with unprecedented payoffs for the lives of our citizens. So, we have the dilemma: should we cut back on Ph.D. training, maintain it at current levels, or allow it to grow? Except in industry, research grants are vital to carry out the research for which Ph.D.s have been trained. As you know, it is increasingly difficult to acquire federal funding for research. Where once one out of three individual investigator initiated research grants were funded at NIH, this success rate is now usually below one in five. The situation is even worse at NSF. Congress has been generous in the past in increasing the NIH budget, but inflation, other mechanisms and programs for funding in the portfolio, and increased bureaucracy have reduced the number of new grants being awarded. As we continue to churn out Ph.D.s, the competition for limited grant resources can only become worse. To correct this situation we have argued that the NSF budget should be doubled in the next five years, and there should be a 13% increase in the NIH budget next year (FASEB Consensus Conference on FY 1994 Federal Biomedical Research Funding). With the tight economy of our nation, this is very unlikely to occur. The other route to correct the success rate is to reduce Ph.D. production. However, any suggestion to reduce Ph.D. production should be counterbalanced by the realization that those choosing jobs in industry (biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, etc) do not need to write grants, so will not be competing in the grant pool. Can predoctoral training grants influence the number of Ph.D.s being produced in the biological sciences? After your Committee has debated what the optimal number of Ph.D.s being produced should be, the next question is how to regulate this number. For Ph.D. graduates in biomedical sciences, 15 percent of male and 20 percent of female graduates were at some point supported as predoctoral trainees. This percentage is higher than I would have guessed, but still sufficiently low that it does not significantly alter Ph.D. production. Most students are supported as teaching assistants or research assistants. Universities are under the gun with reductions in indirect cost recovery, and research grants are harder to get and are cut in amount, so there are few alternative sources of funding to pick up the slack if a training grant is lost. If anything, the site of training might shift from the top schools which currently hold training grants to lesser schools, where students are not supported on training grants, thereby compromising the quality of predoctoral training. In the early 1970s, when several schools lost their training grants, there was no marked change in national Ph.D. production, though I suspect that the site of training changed. Indeed, this was true for Brown University where the number of predoctorals entering into our Ph.D.
APPENDIX D 37 program in Molecular and Cell Biology was drastically cut when we lost NIH training support. The optimal number of predoctoral trainees must be determined by arguments other than numbers of Ph.D.s. we need to produce. The argument becomes one of quality rather than quantity (see below). I believe that the current number of 14,020 predoctoral traineeships is about right, since the study section is able to fund most of the deserving applications for institutional training grants. Due to the budget crunch, it could be argued that tuition charged to training grants should be capped in order to maintain the current number of slots, and your Committee may want to debate the pros and cons of this. This situation is to be contrasted to MSTP grants, where several quality programs go unfunded. The pool for M.D./Ph.D. training is sufficient to request a modest increase (e.g., add 250 positions over the next six years to reach a total of 1,000 MSTP trainees; see FASEB Consensus Conference on FY 1994 Funding). However, this program is much more expensive than Ph.D. predoctoral training, and you must examine its cost effectiveness. A less costly route to train M.D.s in research is by individual postdoctoral fellowships, but the debt to be paid off from medical school makes this less attractive. Nonetheless, surprisingly, about half the 5700 individual NRSA postdoctorals are held by M.D.s as compared to Ph.D.s. Your Committee should examine whether the number of individual NRSA postdoctorals is appropriate. As jobs get scarcer, this is an important holding pool for trained manpower to fill future needs. If there are about 2,000 new NRSA postdoctoral fellowships per year, and half or 1,000 go to Ph.D.s, this means that one third of the 3,000 Ph.D.s produced each year succeed in getting an individual NRSA fellowship. You should confirm if this extrapolation is correct. You might examine the thorny issue of whether a cap should be placed on the number of individual NRSA fellows per lab, as it seems like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Most NRSA fellows are based at only a handful of academic institutions, though one could argue that these prestigious schools have the top quality labs. It would be interesting to compare the institutional distribution of (a) R01 research grants and (b) NRSA individual postdoctoral fellowships to see if they are coincident or not. What is the justification for NRSA predoctoral training grants? Since graduate students are also supported from research grants, why not use this mechanism rather than training grants? What is the advantage of institutional grants over individual fellowships? Usually students are trainees in their first two years of graduate school, when taking courses and research rotations. Training grants afford a flexibility in choice of mentor that would be impossible if students were locked into a particular labâs research grant in their first year. It is inappropriate to have students take courses when they should be spending their full effort on research for the research grant which supports them, so research grant support is best justified for more advanced graduate students. Institutional training grants are a good example of the sum being greater than the parts: (A) The QUALITY of the entire predoctoral program is improved and nontrainees in that program benefit as well as trainees. In the mid-1980s, Porter Coggeshall of the NAS staff did a study on career outcomes. Trainees did better than nontrainees. Your Committee may want to update this study. (B) Training grants induce an interdisciplinary focus. It is difficult to predict emerging fields, so predoctorals with broad training are best qualified to meet the changing manpower needs of the future. In a few cases, where emerging fields with manpower needs can be identified, it is appropriate to have small programs of more specialized training grants (e.g., biotechnology; structural biology; the interface of chemistry and biology). (C) Training grants provide the leverage that would be impossible on individual research grants to influence programmatic aspects. For example, schools with training grants must provide training on ethical issues. Also, they must be proactive in minority recruitment. Finally, with regard to the specific questions of your March 3rd letter, (1) Challenges we face: Your Committee should verify that the number of U.S. citizens applying to Ph.D. programs in the biological sciences is decreasing. The slack in U.S. applicants has been taken up by foreign applicants of high quality, especially from Korea, China, and most recently from Russia. At
APPENDIX D 38 Brown University, although the total number of U.S. applicants to all Biomedical Ph.D. programs has remained constant, they have dropped from 68% to 36% of the pool which has increased due to foreign applicants ( Table I ). In 1990, 30 percent of the Ph.D. recipients in the United States in science and engineering were foreigners. Many of these foreigners wish to remain permanently in the United States, but it is too soon to tell how many will return to their home countries. Are we training our economic competitors of the future? Unfortunately, NRSA awards are not the engine that drive this train, and can only modestly help to lure U.S. students into Ph.D. programs in the biological sciences. The major concern students have is whether there is a rosy career likely in their future. Fierce competition for jobs is not attractive. When they see their own college faculty rewriting research grant applications multiple times, only to be demoralized at not being funded when the reviews are excellent, students shy away from following this career path. Better job and grant opportunities are needed to attract our best U.S. students into careers of biological research. (2) Improvements needed: The stipends for predoctoral trainees and postdoctoral fellows are too low. Most schools have to bend over backwards to find a way to supplement predoctoral stipends to raise them to about $14,000 because supplementation from other federal sources (e.g., research grants) is not allowed. The current stipend is below the poverty line! The stipends for postdoctoral fellows, especially in their first two years, is also too low when compared to salaries for other jobs even without such advanced training. Most predoctorals and postdoctoral work far in excess of a 40 hour week, so the hourly wages could even fall below minimum wages! In both cases, there should be a yearly increase of stipend levels to adjust for inflation rather than waiting about half a dozen years. Adjustment of stipend levels must be built into the NIH budget as an increase; it cannot come out of other sources and should not be counterbalanced by a decreased number of NRSA trainees/fellows (as happened at the time of the last stipend increase). It was helpful when payback for the first year of NRSA support was waived. It would be useful to investigate the number of predoctoral trainees that drop out. If more than 95% succeed in filling the research service requirement of payback, it probably would be cheaper to cut out the payback requirement altogether and recover the costs needed now to administer payback. If our nation wants to endorse higher education and training, then NRSA stipends should not be taxed. Senator Trent Lott (Mississippi) tried to make stipends nontaxable, but unfortunately this was cut out in conference. Many schools do not send 1099 forms to students, and the IRS may soon try to enforce taxation of stipends. (3) Women and minorities: These really should not be linked together, as they represent very different problems. Over 40 percent of the Ph.D.s produced in the life sciences are women, so they are not underrepresented at this stage. The difficulty occurs later when they are limited to a geographical area for job opportunities because of a spouse. Also, there is the problem of child care if they raise a family. Should we have more part-time jobs? NRSA awards can do little to solve these social problems. Much has been done to try to improve minority recruitment. Predoctoral training grants require a proactive stance of the schools they fund. The MARC program tries to support the pool from which minority applicants will come. In addition, recent policy changes permit supplements for minority students supported by research grants. Finally, there is a new program of individual minority predoctoral fellowships. This started off at 100 fellowship awards, but dropped to 50 new fellowships in the second year of this program and less than 30 new starts in the third (current) year because a special budget had not been appropriated for this. The pool would justify funding this program at 50 new fellowships per year. Despite all these efforts, in the end many of the same forces drive minority students as majority students: the best students choose an M.D. over a Ph.D. because it offers a more secure job at a better salary. (4) Strengthen NRSA quality training: Maintain the âabove the lineâ non-trainee expenses allocated to predoctoral training grants, which often is used to support the graduate program seminar series,research day retreats, etc. Good luck to your Committee on its undertaking of this review. I hope your report will be more intelligible than the previous one where the numbers were stated as FTEs rather than slots, and so were hard to interpret.
