Experts look to change biomedical programs in response to limited funding

Changes in federal funding have forced Duke and universities around the country to reevaluate how biomedical research is conducted at the university level.

In February, Duke hosted a panel discussion—“The Unstable Biomedical Research Ecosystem”—in response to a recent report published by the American Academy of Arts and Science titled “Restoring the Foundation.” The report found that the unexpected decrease in funding for biomedical research will make current academic programs unsustainable without proper reform.

“All research-intensive medical schools are highly dependent on [National Institute for Health] research funding to do research that improves health,” said Nancy Andrews, dean of the School of Medicine. “There is no question that the federal investment in research, carried out at medical schools like ours, has led to enormous societal and economic returns. These are in jeopardy now, due to a decrease in federal support.”

Scott Gibson, executive vice dean for administration of the School of Medicine, noted that federal funding historically has accounted for around 57 percent of the School's research expenditures.

Until 2005, federal biomedical funding was on the rise. Dona Chikaraishi, associate dean for biomedical graduate education, pointed out that there are serious concerns about the success of future endeavors if federal funding dries up.

“There was a point, ending about 10 years ago, where the NIH budget was growing very rapidly—it doubled,” Chikaraishi said. “With that growth of money came more people, more labs that wanted to hire more trainees. For quite a while, I think biomedical research was considered a growth industry, and I think that attracted people to it.”

Ross McKinney, a professor of pediatrics who was in attendance at the panel, noted that a stagnation in federal funding has the potential to limit research opportunities and the availability of academic positions in universities.

“We have not developed models designed for an environment in which we are not growing, or even worse possibly contracting,” McKinney said. “It has become harder for junior faculty or trainees to get positions or to get funded. In the School of Medicine’s model, faculties are funded by their research, not by tuition. When the NIH starts to cut back, those junior faculties are not funded and their positions are not sustainable.”

In response to the declining number of opportunities, Duke has also started cutting back on the number of students it accepts into its Ph.D programs, Kornbluth said.

“In fact, in our biomedical graduate programs, we have intentionally reduced the number of students by about 13 percent,” Kornbluth said. “And mainly because we wanted to make sure all of our students could find good training laboratories.”

This has primarily been done through simply accepting fewer applications, Chikaraishi said.

“The other way of weeding [students] out is to try and make it harder for them to pass the prelims and let them proceed,” Chikaraishi said. "I think we’re doing that to an extent, but we haven’t systematically made it more difficult.”

Kornbluth added that this is necessary to promote realistic expectations for incoming graduate students.

"We want to think about training students in reasonable numbers so that they can expect to get a job they want at the other end," Kornbluth said. "If you take in a whole class of students who wanted to be professors you would be creating false expectations because the numbers don’t align. We need to be realistic of what jobs lie at the end of a Ph.D."

Susan Wente, provost of Vanderbilt University and panelist at the discussion, acknowledged a decline in available academic positions, but said she is not hugely concerned about the job prospects of biomedical Ph.Ds.

“If you look at the unemployment rate of scientists with biomedical Ph.Ds, its very low,” Wente said. “Much of the dialogue is that there is not an academic research position tenure-track for everyone of those Ph.Ds, but I think there is huge consensus in support of the understanding that a Ph.D is not simply a track to getting an academic position.”

Wente also added that it is probably better for society that more Ph.Ds stream into jobs outside of academia.

“Our society needs more highly educated scientists as part of it,” Wente said. “We need to raise the scientific literacy of the entire society to be raised by having these individuals playing many roles in policy, in education, in industry, in consulting, in government. If our only job is to create faculty, then we’re a trade school. We’re not fulfilling our educational mission.”

Ultimately, Wente feels that universities need to do a better job of educating people interested in biomedicine of all the career prospects available to them.

“Potential students need to have the opportunity to learn how they can utilize their skills in different ways,” Wente said. “I think that we have too big of a default pathway where 90 percent of biomedical Ph.Ds at [top research] universities go on to do a postdoc. I don’t think that everyone needs a postdoc to do every single type of career, and that’s an opportunity we’re missing.”