The National Institutes of Health has proposed limiting the number of simultaneous grants a single principal investigator can hold, though officials warn the long-term physiological effects of operating without a fourth multi-million dollar endowment remain poorly understood.
The National Institutes of Health has released a preliminary proposal to cap the number of research grants awarded to individual principal investigators, though agency officials heavily cautioned Wednesday that the ability of a top-tier academic to survive on merely two or three simultaneous federal endowments has not yet been demonstrated in clinical trials.
The policy, recently detailed by STAT+, is theoretically designed to increase funding access for scientists at smaller institutions who lack top-of-the-line laboratory equipment. However, leading epidemiologists warn that while early models show promise, the correlation between capping a Harvard researcher’s simultaneous R01 grants and a sudden, catastrophic collapse in their standard of living remains merely associative, not causative.
“While retrospective cohort studies indicate that scientists outside Ivy League institutions have subsisted on zero or one federal grant for decades, extrapolating these findings to a seasoned Johns Hopkins principal investigator requires significant methodological caveats,” read a meta-analysis published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The authors noted that the sample size of elite researchers operating without a massive surplus of unspent federal tax dollars is currently too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.
We are seeing promising early indicators that a principal investigator can maintain basic metabolic function, and perhaps even their secondary summer laboratory, on a single $2.5 million stipend, but we must emphasize these are merely observational findings.
Thorne added a standard conflict-of-interest disclosure, noting that his own department is currently funded by seven concurrent NIH grants, which he relies upon to study the downstream effects of grant deprivation.
The NIH proposal is currently in a 60-day public comment period, a delay that independent researchers say is strictly necessary to control for confounding variables such as private university endowments and existing pharmaceutical industry board seats. Until peer-reviewed, double-blind data confirms that an institutional funding cap is non-lethal, the agency strongly advises top researchers to continue applying for every available federal dollar out of an abundance of caution.