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APPENDIX D 56 that scientific readiness is also involved in those decisions. Specifically in terms of research training, you need to demand that when NIH officials go to Congress to ask for funds, or when they begin their budget planning within the Executive Branch, they do so with the needs for future researchers at the top of their request list. As a science lobbyist, I am time and time again faced with asking members of Congress and their staffs for more funding for research training, and time and time again I am faced with hearing the same reply: âHow can you ask for more researchers to be trained when even now there is only enough money to fund 25 percent of the proposed research worth doing?â Less funding in the future will only make this argument harder to refute. Yet I go to the heads of the federal research agencies and they always raise the pipeline issue--that there may not be enough good researchers in the next several generations to continue their agencyâs mission in the same high quality way. But that is not what they tell Congress or OMB. There they talk about the glitzy research being done under the Decade of the Brain plan, or the Human Genome Project, or what breakthroughs there have been in this area or that. Research training, they tell me, is not what Congress or OMB wants to hear about. Donât be surprised, I tell them, if research training is not what they want to fund, either. Basic Science Still, perhaps even more so in this age of fiscal austerity, there are opportunities for your Committee to have an important impact on how even relatively little research training money can be productively spent in the next few years. Let me briefly discuss some important issues in psychologyâs research training. Among the most pressing problems is the tendency to push too quickly toward applied research in response to budget and political pressures. NSF is in danger of becoming a mission agency. At NIH, the leadership generally takes a narrow view of behavioral science, seeing it in terms of application and intervention without recognition of basic behavioral research. For example, they recognize the need to call on behavioral science in changing attitudes or lifestyles that affect health status directly--how to stop smoking, for instance--while they underemphasize important areas of basic behavioral research on issues like how children develop, how basic processes of learning and thinking take place, what is the nature of the interaction between behavior and biology--areas that need to be investigated before you think about application. The curious part of this is that these same leaders make the assumption that if an illness or disorder has some biological basis, then investing in basic biological research is going to pay off eventually in treatment, prevention, and even cure. We need to encourage the same assumption on the behavioral side. If there is a behavioral component to a disorder, we need to invest in basic behavioral research if we ultimately hope to intervene effectively. Because schizophrenia appears to have a genetic component, it is natural to assume that research in molecular genetics will inform us about its course. But schizophrenia is also a disorder involving distorted thought, language, and emotions. That means before we can adequately understand those aspects of schizophrenia, we ought to be putting resources into basic behavioral research in cognition, language development, and the regulation of emotions. Within your mission, this translates into promoting research training in basic behavioral science within NRSA. As research priorities become more applied throughout the federal agencies, it will be particularly important to maintain a quality core of basic research training in behavioral science. Clinical Science Now let me argue for a need on the other side--the lack of quality research training in clinical psychology. Clinical psychology training programs are moving toward training more practitioners, with less and less emphasis on research. The reasons are many. They include a changing psychology accreditation system that overemphasizes practice concerns, a marketplace where the salary gap between a research and practice career in clinical psychology is growing wider, a training model that removes a graduate student from a research university to take a yearâs internship before the Ph.D. is completed, and too little contact with severe mental disorders throughout training. The result is less complicated. With a few exceptions, the next generation of clinical researchers in psychology is nowhere to be found. And this is occurring in the context of psychiatry rediscovering its research base and neuroscience research redefining what we mean by mental disorders.
