Searching for a consensus on how to fix biomedical research

In the US, biomedical research has been suffering for roughly the last decade. There are a number of reasons, including stagnant or declining federal funding, lack of appropriate training for young researchers, excessive regulations that detract from productivity, and issues with intellectual property rights. To remedy these concerns, both individual researchers and entire organizations have invested time and resources into making recommendations to resolve one or more of the perceived issues.

So far, however, little progress has been made on any measures that could improve the research environment. To assist in identifying areas where immediate action should be taken, the authors of yet another set of recommendations conducted a meta-analysis of the existing proposals. They were able to identify eight that were endorsed by a majority of scientific community leaders.

While the report is useful for figuring out what the consensus solutions are, it brings us no closer to implementing any of them.

The researchers systematically searched for post-2012 publications that addressed the sustainability issues in research. They excluded pre-2012 publications because recommendations made in years prior to 2012 were often obsolete. They also excluded publications that only made recommendations that would affect a small subset of biomedical research. After screening out publications that didn’t fit their criteria, they were left with nine reports, which were consolidated into 54 unique recommendations. Of these 54, eight were endorsed by the majority of leading representatives of the scientific community.

(Aside from these recommendations, each of the reports contained language emphasizing the need to strengthen investigator-driven research and rigorous scientific training. But those are good ideas even when funding is plentiful.)

The eight recommendations all focused on institutional- and federal-level issues. Four of the eight contained some version of a recommendation to increase or stabilize funding for research, researchers, or graduate students. Again, most people in research would like to see that.

Two of the eight recommendations appeared to be inconsistent with each other, however. One suggested decreasing the duration of research training, while another argued for simultaneously increasing the breadth of training, so students would gain a broader educational base and the ability to start working sooner.

The penultimate recommendation focused on eliminating federal or institutional regulations that increase costs and slow the pace of research. The final recommendation was for institutions and federal agencies to provide more employment for trained scientists.

While these recommendations all seem reasonable in an abstract sense, they weren’t all supported with strong implementation strategies or measures to account for the reality of limitations in the federal budget for research.

Recommendations related to stabilizing the funding for science included the suggestion of an interagency working group that could generate multi-year funding budget strategies; there was also the suggestion that industry or academic institutions could increase their investment in research. These suggestions seem to be idealistic and unrealistic, given the financial realities these constituencies face at the federal level. With a lot of companies and institutions struggling in the post-recession era, contributing additional funds to research initiatives may simply be impossible for them, as well.

Similarly, the recommendation to hire more staff scientists wasn’t backed by a tangible idea on how to find the funding for more staff scientists, so this recommendation would also be hard to implement. The recommendation for hiring of more staff scientists specifies “commensurate” compensation for these positions to attract strong researchers, but doesn’t specify the type of position that would be adequate (i.e. tenure-track research positions only, or research positions with good salaries, etc).

Reducing graduate student training was accompanied by the suggestion that it could be done by imposing limits on federal grant length for graduate education, which is a concrete and tangible way to achieve that goal. Universities would either have to push their students through the program faster or face footing the bill for their salaries. While that could be implemented on the federal level, the recommendation to increase the breadth of graduate student training could not. In this case, it was accompanied by the suggestion that institutions should be individually responsible for expanding the coursework. Without incentives or regulations to drive these changes, they’re unlikely to happen.

The recommendation to reduce regulations referred to House Bill 1119, which would eliminate some outdated regulations for research. The authors suggest the scientific community advocate for the passage of this bill; however, passing any federal-level bills at all has become notoriously difficult due to partisanship in the Capitol. Without any explanation of how this bill could overcome partisanship, it’s hard to evaluate its chances.

Overall, the recommendations made in this article are reasonable in an abstract sense. They seem to address real problems in the field of biomedical research and present solutions that appear to address some of the most salient of them. This strategy may serve to provide some galvanizing focus points for those with the power to influence policy, providing them with the tools to speak to policymakers in consistent and reasonable terms.

While that's undoubtedly how the recommendations are intended, the document as a whole is unlikely to rally the research community, given that they don't consider the real-world limitations that can prevent change and don’t recognize the financial realities that may be constraining biomedical research. Therefore, these recommendations may be frustrating to scientists working in the field who encounter these obstacles daily. For those on the ground, ideas that are more grounded in the real-life complications might be a more effective way to move forward.

Author's Recommendations:

• Recommendation 1: Federal funding should be made predictable and sustainable.
• Recommendation 2: Federal government should increase overall research funding.
• Recommendation 3: Federal agencies should harmonize, streamline, or eliminate burdensome regulations.
• Recommendation 4: Institutions and federal agencies should increase compensation for postdoctoral scholars.
• Recommendation 5: Institutions and federal agencies should reduce graduate student and postdoc training periods.
• Recommendation 6: Institutions and federal agencies should train students and postdocs for the breadth of careers available to them.
• Recommendation 7: Institutions and federal agencies should shift support of trainees toward training grants and fellowships.
• Recommendation 8: Institutions and federal agencies should increase the use of staff scientists.

PNAS, 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1509901112 (About DOIs).