NIH Taking on More RIsk?

You'd have to think that this is at least a step in the right direction: "NIH to experiment with high-risk grants": On 5 December, agency director Francis Collins told an advisory committee that the NIH should consider supporting more individual researchers, as opposed to research proposals as it does now — an idea inspired in part by the success of the high-stakes Pioneer awards handed out by the NIH's Common Fund. “It’s time to look at balancing our portfolio,” says Collins, who plans to pitch the idea to NIH institute directors at a meeting on 6 January. The NIH currently spends less than 5% of its US$30-billion budget on grants for individual researchers, including the annual Pioneer awards, which give seven people an average of $500,000 a year for five years. In contrast, the NIH’s most popular grant, the R01, typically awards researchers $250,000 per year for 3‒5 years, and requires a large amount of preliminary data to support grant applications. They're not going to get rid of the R01 grant any time soon, but what Collins is talking about here is getting a bit more like the Howard Hughes funding model (HHMI grants run for five years as well, and tend to be awarded more towards the PI than towards the stated projects). One problem is that the NIH is evaluating the success of the Pioneer grants by noting that the awardees publish more highly-cited papers, and that may or may not be a good measure: But critics say that there is little, if any, evidence t...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Who Discovers and Why Source Type: blogs