Comment by PhotonHunter
2 days ago
It really depends on what you mean by "decades", but I've been in the system for a generation and what you're saying doesn't match what I see on the ground.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
I was also in science during Clinton, and what I’m saying was true then. The increase in funding went hand in hand with a massive increase in people seeking funding. So maybe there was some golden era of happy times when nobody had to chase grants, but it hasn’t been in my lifetime.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
The Clinton era was the golden age for life sciences (can’t speak to others) and it’s been a decline since then, either stagnant or a sharper downturn. Now? Complete operational collapse, a completely different animal altogether, and it’s not one agency it’s all agencies. You seem to be saying that chasing grants is not unprecedented, which has been true since Galileo and the patron system, but that isn’t a profound observation it’s the status quo. What I and others on the ground are saying is that now is a sudden and profound shift, having committed funding pulled or applications in process effectively frozen and simultaneously new awardees decimated, in a way that is impossible to sustain the basic and translational research enterprise. And outside of the feds, there isn’t a viable source of patient capital to turn to on the scale we’ve been operating.
Yes, I understand your claim that things are tighter now; I've repeatedly acknowledged that fact, and in any case, I have no personal basis to dispute the argument. But again, that's not related to the point I'm making.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding, but that's always been true in my lifetime. There's never been a magical age where being a PI (or even a senior lab member) wasn't a perpetual process of raising funds, and anyone going into science should know this. Hence my comment: welcome to academia.
For whatever it's worth, this is basically reason #1 that most PhD grads I know voluntarily jumped off the hamster wheel. Anyone who gets a PhD and expects to be doing labwork as a PI is deeply deluded, and it needs to be shouted for the folks in the back: you are signing up for a lifetime of writing grants, teaching classes, and otherwise doing bureaucratic schleps. The current administration did not suddenly make this true.
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