It is even worse than that - that actual quote is "At the National Institutes of Health, the average age of a FIRST grant is 42 for a Ph.D. and 44 for an M.D."  To be fair, that is the average age of receiving your first R01, which is the major large grant given to individual PIs (Principlal Investigators) - the kind of grant that lets you run a full lab.  There are a number of grants which scientists often pursue until (and after) that first R01 comes in but these grants are both smaller and shorter than the five-year R01.

This truly is keeping younger scientists from being able to pursue promising new ideas.  Increasingly, the way to get funding is to stick to small, safe projects which make incremental advances but have a greater chance of resulting in at least some sort of publication.  This funding situation is pushing science towards low risk, low reward research projects.

"This funding situation is pushing science towards low risk, low reward research projects."

Low risk, low reward projects, welcome to post modern times.

Yet another example of the way Tweedledum and Tweedledee ignore the really major issues facing our fragile world leadership role. As with so many issues - Mexico policy, NATO's collapse, race-based affirmative action, schools policy - each party sees no political upside in telling the nation some hard truths when it comes to scientific excellence.

Tweedledum, besotted as always with identity politics and academic grievance-shopping, views excellence in any field dominated by elite males as suspect in and of itself, and would rather fund college women's field hockey programs, Queer Studies, anything but basic scientific research of the sort that validates Larry Summers' offhand remarks about distribution of talent by gender.

Tweedledee, besotted for its own part with the magic of the marketplace, aka faeries and unicorns, denies any role to federal funding in preserving our vanishing lead in scientific research. DARPA, the space program, land grant colleges, FLAS and other Cold War-era fellowships? Naah, leave it up to the private sector. We don't need to learn nothin' from those stinkin' Euros and Asians, anyway.

I'm glad to see this issue wiggling its way into the mainstream.  I've been involved with the ScienceDebate2008 endeavor, and have been truly disappointed in the lack of response by the candidates.  The public is generally unaware of the vital role of Federal funding agencies (NIH and NSF) in driving biomedical research, which in my mind is heart of the problem; the candidates are unresponsive because the public is ignorant of the issue.  The public sees universities as simply a place where students get their ticket to play in the economy of the private sector.  There is very little understanding of the almost exclusive role of university research faculty in driving science research in the United States.  They don't understand that a biotech company is not going to invest in basic research without a specific marketable outcome on the very near horizon.  In reality, most breakthroughs in disease treatment result from findings in basic science labs at universities, whose publicly reported fiindings are adapted to therapy development.

As someone who is struggling to maintain a funding stream for my own lab, I can say that the situation has become dire, and the morale of biomedical research faculty is at the lowest point in my scientific career.  Paylines (the cutoff point for funding) at all NIH institutes has dropped to historically low levels, and is at less than 10% in some cases.  As maxzig1stated, it forces researchers to retreat to proposing safe projects that have pretty much already been mostly completed, or cynically framing their work as relevant to a disease that they really have no interest in, just to increase funding chances.  The heady days of discovery for its own sake is a fond memory of the past, something that today's junior faculty will sadly not likely experience.  The grant proposals that my preceptors routinely had funded would not even make it to a full review these days.

One very tangible outcome of this crisis will be that the entire model of the partnership between Federal agencies and academia will likely collaspe in the near future if these trends are not reversed.  Universities rely on research faculty to teach undergraduate and graduate courses, and train graduate students in thesis research, and to maintain a productive research program.  However, this is expected to be paid for by the faculty through Federal grant funding, the NIH R01 beiing the standard for the biomedical sciences.  Faculty are expected to pay part of their salaries, and to support their graduate students' tuition and stipend.  Indeed, extramural funding is a primary condition of tenure.  Soon, if not already, there will not be enough grants to fund the faculty base required to perform these functions, and universities will either have to pick up the tab (not going to happen), or revert to simple teaching institutions with no research or graduate school component.  This is not the fault of the faculty, or their science.  Unfortunately, solid science is no longer sufficient to garner funding.

I am a believer in generously funding incubators for getting new technology, even if it a bit wacky, off the ground, but my experience with major federal funding grants to commercialize energy related technologies was very negative.

I had the opportunity to see T. Boone Pickens addressing a town hall meeting at Georgetown University Business School on C-Span last evening. His ideas on making the US energy independent trump anything I have heard elsewhere, and he has the wherewithal to make much of it happen with little or no government involvement.

Other areas of science, such as biotech may be very different, but my experience with government backed university research is also negative. The emphasis is on getting grant money. Commercialization is an afterthought.  

come on now, we can just keep on importing all of our scientists from India and China. Let us not pretend we don't either. Good lord, Americans going back to science would put me out of business since I have been teaching English to a whole generation of people whose main goal is to make money in the states.

Unqualified praise for Marty's post.

Blackton -- yet importing scientists from India and China (and during the 1990's we were brain-draining Canada!) is tied to our monetary policy (Iraq/tax cuts = weak dollar = less attraction) -- all these issues fall into a maddening stew!

There's a parallel discussion here for importing doctors and, especially, nurses.  

The situation largely the same in other areas of science, if not worse. In fact, to those of us in Earth Scieces, the biomedical types have looked like they were on the gravy train, because the NIH budget was climbing much faster than other areas of science. But the NIH budget has now flatlined, and biomedical sciences are probably now facing the problem of what happens when you are accelerating and suddenly hit a wall.

Proposal success rates in my area of research, and related fields, have dropped by a factor of 2 in the last few years. They are now low enough that the problems ritebrother describes are all present in my field. On top of that, I am worried about whether peer review of research proposals is going to survive -- if you think that the best chance to get funded is by anonymously cutting the throats of your peers by subtly trashing their proposals, some people will do it because the penalties of not getting funded (not getting paid, not getting tenure = getting fired) are very high.

R-ennis, I think you are missing the point. You are talking about what is more at the Development end of Research and Development. Although that part is important, once new technologies or techniques reach the point where commercial applications become visible, there are a variety of ways to take it the rest of the way (and once something is clearly commercially viable, the private sector will absolutely take over). The problem is with the basic research end of things. Today's basic research is what leads to tomorrow's applied research, commercialization, new products, better weather forecasts, better natural hazard forecasting and warnings, etc.

In the 1960s there were a number of corporate labs that carried out a wide range of basic research, often on ideas and technologies that were years to decades away from commercial applications. Some of that included "blue sky" research that led to totally unexpected technologies down the road. Today, the only entity left that supports this kind of research across the board is the Federal government. If we want to see stagnation in applied research and development of new technologies in a decade or two, the surest way to achieve that is cut basic research today.

Importing scientists is not the answer -- that has been the answer for a generation. We attracted them because the US was the best place to do research, so we have been able to draw scientists not just from China and India and other places where coming here was a big economic step up, but also many scientists from developed countries. If we let our research base stagnate, they will not come. Instead, we will start to be on the losing end of the brain drain. Because you had better believe that Europe and the developed economies of Asia are not stopping their support for scientific research. Even China, which is a mix of developed and backward, is starting to develop significant research capabilities, and is producing an astonishing number of engineers.

But we can always support ourselves by selling flag lapel pins to Presidential candidates, I guess, even if we let our edge over the rest of the world disappear.

JEFF,

Ironically, those of us in the NIH funded medical sciences are now being advised to apply for DoD or NSF grants because the pay lines are higher than those of the NCI.  I feel your pain though, your Earth Sciences funding cycle was down for several years while the NIH's was still in "the doubling."

Survive the droughts, I wish you well.

Science is getting starved in this country because it can not be manipulated to political ends.  But it will come back in fashion, because everyone likes reality-based results.

Congratulations to Marty for this post!

The funding situation is really bad. In UK, Germany and Japan labs are much better funded.

US is losing. It's not a matter of importing people from China and India. It's that without funding, things are going down. Which is what has been happening in the past eight years here.

Thanks for the kind thoughts, maxzig1. Good luck to you as well.

I know everyone's still preoccupied with Obama's "bitter" comments, but I'd argue