The NIH Takes a Look At How the Money's Spent

The NIH is starting to wonder what bang-for-the-buck it gets for its grant money. That's a tricky question at best - some research takes a while to make an impact, and the way that discoveries can interact is hard to predict. And how do you measure impact, by the way? These are all worthy questions, but here's apparently the way things are being approached: Michael Lauer's job at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to fund the best cardiology research and to disseminate the results rapidly to other scientists, physicians, and the public. But NIH's peer-review system, which relies on an army of unpaid volunteer scientists to prioritize grant proposals, may be making it harder to achieve that goal. Two recent studies by Lauer, who heads the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in Bethesda, Maryland, raise some disturbing questions about a system used to distribute billions of dollars of federal funds each year. (MiahcalLauer recently analyzed the citation record of papers generated by nearly 1500 grants awarded by NHLBI to individual investigators between 2001 and 2008. He was shocked by the results, which appeared online last month in Circulation Research: The funded projects with the poorest priority scores from reviewers garnered just as many citations and publications as those with the best scores. That was the case even though low-scoring researchers had been given less money than their top-rated peers. I ...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs