I recently wrote about the trend away from funding young scientists as independent investigators, with a graph of age distributions at NIH and related observations here. There’s been a lively discussion at the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog. I posted a link there to an NIH dataset [XLS spreadsheet], and a commenter said:
I plotted median age by year using the data linked to: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2023750/med-age-NIH-by-year.PNG
I have never seen a yearly trend for anything that is so linear. Can anyone explain it?
Of investigators receiving their first NIH grant, more are over age 65 than under 35. As I indicated in my earlier post, Darwin and Einstein had done their groundbreaking work while in an age bracket that NIH has defunded.
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The median age of grantholders appears to have increased by nearly half a year per year for the past 35 years. That’s staggering.
But could this be the results of the young winners of the old keep on winning funding as they age at the expense of the new blood? A sort of winner reinforcement mechanism. But of course, it does mean that younger scientists are being funded less.
A naive or maybe obvious explanation perhaps.
Really interesting thing to reflect about. I am not really sure why is this happening but I am sure that several factors must be influencing it, not just one.
If you have a population which continuously ages then, of course, you get a linear progression of average age over the population over time. Now, if you infuse new blood at some constant interval, that progression will slow, but I don’t see that it would go away. Isn’t that what the graph basically shows, or am I missing something?
The shift of funding away from younger scientists is somewhat disturbing, but what I find surprising about the linearity of the trend is that the shift of funding shows no sign of approaching a steady state.
However, it’s the data in the small graph — of changing distributions of the ages at which investigators receive their first independent grants — that looks clearly pathological. There is no excuse, in terms of science and the public interest, for the almost complete cessation of support for young independent investigators. There are reasons for this, of course, but they have to do with the interaction of demographics, long-term funding trends, and institutional politics; these explain, but don’t excuse, the outcome.
I talk about how I dealt with my funding difficulties on my web site here: http://www.danroe.net/
I don’t understand why it’s not more widely recognized in the scientific community that our mentoring system is a pyramid scheme. Its flat our objective, kids! Then again, if you’re still catching on, it took me some time too. Some of us are talking about it:
http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2009/02/the_stimulus_the_nih_-_what_no.php
http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2008/08/a_way_to_break_out_of_the_pyra.php
http://drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/the-pyramid-scheme/
http://chronicle.com/article/Biomedical-Scientists-Are/20562/
This explains the data! And quite nicely, don’t you think?
The thing NOT to do is throw more money at the NIH. I’m better off keeping my tax money and putting it into the lab I built at home (with the refuse of gov. funded research labs).
Let the old timers die off. They ran the ship into the reefs.
dan roe
By the way, I like your work Eric. We might keep you around until we force you out at age 65. ;-)
dan
@ Dan Roe — The pyramid-scheme pattern of education and employment in academic science is, of course, the result of a process that started generations ago, and it extends far beyond the NIH.
The problem is a consequence of the end of a centuries-long period of fast, exponential growth in the size of academic science. The traditions and institutional patterns that worked for generations were geared for professors spawning successively larger generations of professors by training multiple students for academic jobs.
This growth-based dynamic hit a soft but very real wall in the last few decades. Science spending in the U.S. is now a stable percentage of a slowly-growing GDP. A greater flow of PhDs out of academia is one adaptation.
Fluctuations in agency funding cause needless local feasts and famines, and these tend to obscure the unavoidable transition.
The 1963 classic by Derek de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science, analyzed the structure and demographics of science, and predicted essentially what we now see, including other pathologies.
No villains, big problems, inadequate responses.
Thanks for your thoughts and for the reference, Eric. By the way, I’ve worked with excellent scientists who I respect, and I want to clarify an issue that you likely know very well but that hasn’t come across in my posts: It’s a lot easier to criticize groups (e.g., “gray beards” (I’m graying) or “old timers”) than it is to criticize individuals. Individual scientists are generally very intelligent and hard-working. But as a group we’re just as big and stupid as any other! Maybe even worse than some….
It makes me feel that the problem must be understood at the systems level. The individual parts of the system are generally quite healthy, yet the system itself is broken. It may be that we need to throw out the system, not the parts. There’s a radical idea. ;-)
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