The NIH has proposed to set the indirect cost rate for its grants at 15%. There’s the usual outrage. I don’t feel that outrage, however. I don’t even feel a desire to preserve the present approach to federally supported research. And I’ve worked in university technology transfer for a number of years, so I know some of the folks who will be affected. I’m sorry, folks. This will be hard for you. But the federal research system is a fail, and so is everything else that universities have tried to make emulate the federal system. Something has to change. May as well start with this.
The outrage argument is that an indirect cost change to 15% will destroy university research and the public won’t get life-saving drugs, among other things. Makes it sound pretty darned devastating. But it’s melodrama. The first part is sort of true–a 15% indirect cost rate will destroy research administration as we know it. Whoohoo! And a 15% indirect cost rate may reduce research activities at some universities (because of a lack of research administrators and researchers who only want to work in brand new buildings). That, too, may be a good thing, not a disaster at all.
But the second part of the claim–that we won’t get life-saving drugs–is so weird I don’t know quite how to unroll it. University research produces only a very few compounds that make it to commercial drugs, and even then those drugs are typically sold at prices that violate the Bayh-Dole Act and are affront to public funding, and even then those drugs generally don’t save lives–they delay disease progression, or have different side effects than other interventions. These drugs “save lives” in the sense of prolonging life by making acute conditions less acute, or hopefully chronic, so the patient lives a long life dependent on a $100K/year drug regimen. What if I want life-saving prevention? Or a real cure? Maybe not a new patented drug sold at 100x a reasonable profit? Oh, that’s fussy idealism.Not the way the monopoly money world works. Consider: research is not the only road to discovery. University-hosted research certainly is not. Discovery that prolongs a problem is not the same as discovery that obsolesces the problem. And research for the sake of publication or for the sake of getting more research–academic virtues, here–is, well, not worth funding.
So I say a reset on the indirect cost rate is a good thing. Something has to change. May as well start here. Let’s get a few points out of the way.
The indirect cost money pays for research administrators and building maintenance, not for research. You have to do some strange logic to get to “if research administrators don’t get paid, they will shut down the research.”
University indirect cost rates for clinical trials is roughly half the research indirect cost rate. So all those drug trials at universities are already closer to 15% than they are to the full indirect cost rate.
Universities lose money on their extramural research–that is, they pay more to research administrators than they get in indirect costs. So the universities rob tuition and make students go deep into debt to pay research administrators. It’s not like the research is so important that research administrators, or senior administrators, will take out personal loans to provide the money to get the research done.
Many universities have overrun their own infrastructure and cost efficiencies chasing federal research dollars. If universities specialized rather than try to do everything, they would not have such complexities in administration. Stop doing animal research, say. Get rid of the facilities, cages, the policies, the review committees, the special contracting, the procurement, the legal all tied to animal research. Or biomedical research. Let some other university specialize in such research administrator heavy stuff.
For some universities running efficient research administration programs in lower cost regions of the country, dropping to 15% is not all the difficult–and is therefore competitive for them. Research will migrate to the universities that can handle it–not necessarily in fancy new buildings that have to be paid off over 30 years, or staffed by research administrators pulling down six-figure salaries, but with so much less volume that a university can get by on way fewer administrators and at a much lower facilities cost.
There’s a huge amount of administrative effort in negotiating an indirect cost rate with a federal agency. Lots of data gathering, spinning, and presenting. Just unload it all. Pick a typical rate, like 15%. Level the playing field. Push research administrators to be efficient. If volume is a problem, the reduce the volume, help researchers find other places that have excess capacity or more efficient research administrators.
The current “system” of federal funding of research is a disaster. It is not a system that has “broken”–this system has never worked. It was a fail from the start, unless the goal has been to provide a jobs program for researchers and especially research administrators and their lawyers and auditors and risk managers and HR personnel, supervisors, assistant supervisors, policy writers, oversight committees, records managers, and PR spokespersons. From that perspective, things have been wildly successful.
There’s more, and it’s worse. It’s about the research–the institutionally hosted and regulated systematic research that is constrained by a detailed statement of work and detailed budget filed for review on agency-specified deadlines. That research. The research that research administrators administrate. To do this sort of research, as a researcher, you have to know what you are going to propose months ahead of that deadline, have to follow a pile of rules for the preparation of the proposal, including the margins, font, number of pages and the like–you know, like a high school paper, but now about something you already know enough about that you can make a proposal that sounds plausible to reviewers who will score the proposal for funding. And heaven help you if you propose a project that may well show the reviewers’ own research results are wrong or useless.
Consider:
Csaba Czabo has a new book coming out, Unreliable. Here are some excerpts from an interview with Czabo about the book:
If you look at all the published literature—not just the indexed articles on PubMed but everything that is published anywhere—probably 90% of it is not reproducible. That was shocking even to me. And probably 20–30% of it is totally made up.
Here’s another article, by Marcus Munafò et al. (including John Ioannidis):
Data from many fields suggests reproducibility is lower than is desirable8,9,10,11,12,13,14; one analysis estimates that 85% of biomedical research efforts are wasted14, while 90% of respondents to a recent survey in Nature agreed that there is a ‘reproducibility crisis’15.
And this effort to reproduce findings of top papers in cancer research:
An ambitious project that set out 8 years ago to replicate findings from top cancer labs has drawn to a discouraging close. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB) reports today that when it attempted to repeat experiments drawn from 23 high-impact papers published about 10 years ago, fewer than half yielded similar results.
The same goes for nutrition studies, psychology studies, and physics, too:
“All of the theoretical work that’s been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction,” says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “That’s a very shocking state of affairs.
Here’s physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (“Science is in trouble and it worries me”):
When it comes to research, we are making increasingly more effort for less in return…. Most of today’s research does not translate into societal progress…. the most likely cause of this scientific decline is that it’s something to do with the way we organize research…. I don’t blame scientists for this. They don’t want it that way. They’re just trying to survive in a broken system….
There’s more in Sabine’s video. I’ve just quoted some less snarky bits. Stay with it to her outré on bullshit science.
There is a strong urge to explain all this apparent non-productivity away–“this is how science works” and “the attempts to reproduce may themselves be flawed” and “look at all the patents that research has produced.”
The core message though remains–that most publicly funded research is unreliable. There really isn’t a rebuttal to this core message except that to preserve the science status quo is really important. Folks aren’t out there showing that the published findings really are reproducible. They argue instead that it’s okay to publish crap that looks like non-crap. Nothing of Feynman’s standard of intellectual honesty expected of scientists.
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
There’s even this article by Robert T. Pennock, a philosopher at Michigan State, that walks back Feynman’s statement, arguing it is an ideal that fails in practice (because he can construct dilemmas) and thus the gist of Pennock’s argument is that it can’t be in the public interest to be intellectually honest in one’s scientific publications, even if one might strive toward some sort of “integrity” rather than “honesty”–that is, to do a good job navigating between lies, half-truths, and candor. Come to terms with your dishonest self. It’s okay to be sketch on what you publish for other scientists and for the general public as long as you are true to yourself (or at least your self-interest), I guess. Okay.
Providing more funding to researchers with this mindset does not improve the reliability of the results they claim to have got; more funding makes more unreliable research. It’s not clear how anyone should expect scientific progress from such a mess. More funding appears to attract even less capable researchers. Some years ago, when the NIH received a huge allocation of funds as part of an economic stimulation package, rather than funding a different sort of research–say, work that might have a near-term economic impact (that is, an actual public benefit)–the NIH merely funded proposals that had missed the normal cutoff. Yes, just fund the lousier proposals because, well, no one has to think, and apparently no one really cares.
But everyone starts screaming when the indirect cost rate goes from 60% to 15% and research administrators have to take a haircut. It’s as if university folks have come to think that research proposals are just a clever scheme to keep research administrators riding high on the hog. The protest thinking, such as it is, goes along the lines of: “Without research administrators, we will never cure cancer.” It’s possible, of course, that institutionally hosted research will never cure cancer or prevent cancer anyway, and if we are to have cancer cures, or prevention, those will arise somewhere else, maybe without research proposals, or federal funding. Maybe just doctors trying things. Maybe a small company like Sage Medic trying things.
Even if a 15% indirect cost rate did cut out 60% of research administrators and reduce the salaries of the rest, how is that bad for research? And if the research that is at risk of being ruined by the loss of research administrators is 90% unreliable, how bad off are we in losing out when the research administrators threaten to shut down that research? I hope you see the point.
From the status quo perspective, preserving the university research system means continue making money for researchers, research administrators, and the lawyers and auditors. If there are shortfalls in funding these folks, raid other budgets for the money. “Fixing the system” means “making even more money” for those folks. It is not possible to have a discussion about fixing the system, or changing the system, or even improving the system that leaves less money for research administration or building new fancy research buildings.
Certainly there is no discussion about changing the outcomes, choosing better research approaches, or abandoning proposal-based research, or grant-based research, or research so complicated or grandiose or restricted that it has to have a bunch of administrators with spreadsheets, databases, policies, audits, and the like. It is unthinkable that we folks don’t want *research* really at all. We want practice change that gets us better health, or better energy, or better communication, or liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That stuff. Research is just one possible way to get to any of this. Research is just one possible way to get to discovery. At the very least, university research ought to be honest, don’t you think?
When research administrators meet to plan their next protest, they don’t consider whether they are at least part of the problem, whether they like it or not. This has nothing to do with their competence, sincerity, diligence, or integrity. Perhaps that’s why an indirect cost rate of 15% is simply beyond their capacity to fathom. They cannot imagine discovery without them, without systematic, pseudo-competitive complicated proposal-based research hosted at universities and funded by the federal government. Proposing research that reduces or eliminates the need for administrators just seems harsh, if not cruel. Proposing discovery that’s reliable and doesn’t require even a complicated detailed budget and work plan seems like pure illusion.
If breaking the current fail-from-the-get-go system is okay, we might as well posit that replacing this fail system with a new system is also a bad thing. We ought not be fixated on systems. Perhaps that is a problem with federal money–it has to be accounted for (orp, orp, current news excepted), there have to be reports, and authorizations to purchase, and properly conducted bidding, and the like. (I once worked with a senior NASA official who was involved in the Apollo program. At his facility, the secretaries kept cash in their desks. If you needed a new oscilloscope, you asked the secretary for the cash–here’s $10K, go into town and pick up what you need. Auditors reach for their defib equipment.
What the current research system has produced is a big mess of unreliable, useless, sometimes fraudulent, often inept publications as the institutional contribution to society, with over a hundred thousand U.S. patents taken out by universities and related foundations and institutes to make sure the public does not have open access to use any of these inventions, such as they are. But that’s just the researchers stuck in a broken system. I’m talking about the research administrators. That’s who is threatened with a reduction to 15% of indirect costs on federal grants. And in turn it is the research administrators, apparently, who are threatening to shut down the research. “If we lose our jobs, we will shut down this shit show of mostly unreliable published results.” Well, now.
I don’t see the point of supporting the protests. I want to see the federal research system revisited, back to the methods of the Smithsonian Institutions, the Research Corporation, the major industry laboratories like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and Vannevar Bush’s ideas that would have given us a National Research Foundation but instead we got a National Science Foundation and a mandate from Senator Harley Kilgore to spread the work around. Look at the 1947 Attorney General’s Report authored by David Lloyd Kreeger, President Kennedy’s 1963 executive branch patent policy and how it was subsequently undermined, finally, by the awful Bayh-Dole Act and the Department of Commerce’s even more awful regulations. Ask have all the regulations that have been put up to fence in research and research results done a lick of good? Spoiler: no.
If we want change for life, health, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and elimination of the designated hitter, then our concern ought to be with creating the conditions for insight, epiphany, discovery, practice change worth changing for. Research may have a role. Maybe even university research. Let’s see.