$1.1 billion in grants will shift to young researchers

In an effort to free up more funding for younger scientists, the National Institutes of Health will redistribute $1.1 billion of its budget over the next five years to fund research grants for early and midcareer researchers, the agency announced Thursday.

The agency is the biggest funder of research initiatives at leading Bay Area institutions, including UCSF, Stanford and UC Berkeley, which are among the top recipients of the agency’s grant money. The change may result in some grant money being shifted from more established, senior researchers to junior researchers.

The move is expected to result in about 2,000 more grants to early and midcareer scientists over the next five years. It represents a small slice of the overall research budget at the agency, the research arm of the Health and Human Services Department, which last year distributed $26 billion in grants.

“This is not going to be a drastic slam against the rest of our portfolio,” said Director Francis Collins. “It will be an important one to fix what we think is turning out to be an unhealthy situation.”

The plan is a less stringent version of a previous proposal that would have capped the number of grants each individual researcher could receive — an idea that received a swift and vocal objection from major labs.

The initiative is meant to help correct an imbalance in the distribution of grants. About 10 percent of the agency-funded researchers receive more than 40 percent of its grants.

The percentage of recipients who are 60 or older has grown steadily since the early 2000s, while the percentage of younger recipients (46 to 60, and 45 or younger) has stalled or declined during the same period, according to National Institutes of Health data. This is largely because the grant review process takes into account researchers’ track records in publishing papers and managing research teams — factors that favor more experienced scientists.

The change may help stabilize the workforce and keep young scientists in the field, agency officials said. Some young researchers agree.

“If you have a whole arena of young investigators coming in who are unable to get funding for the first five or 10 years, it really hinders your ability to get into academic science,” said Stephen Floor, 35, who recently completed postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and is an assistant professor at UCSF who studies human RNA. “Your ability to obtain a grant as an early investigator can determine whether you can continue in that job or not.”

But Nevan Krogan, a leading researcher in systems biology at UCSF who receives a number of government grants, said he would like to see more details about how the change will be implemented. Many grants from the National Institutes of Health go to what’s called collaborative research — joint projects that often involve experienced and younger researchers working together. Krogan said he hopes the change would not divert funding from those grants.

“You have to be careful about implementing some sort of socialist or communist system,” Krogan said. “If you say you want to somehow take money away from those that have a lot and give it to those that don’t have a lot, that sounds great. But the devil is in the details.”