Extra money for young researchers

Well, that's good:

Medical scientists just starting at universities have been, more and more often, left empty-handed when the federal government awards grants. So on Monday the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to medical research, announced a little help: a new program that will award $300-million to as many as 70 young scientists.

The Early Career Scientist Program will pay salaries and provide research money for people who have held tenure-track positions for only two to six years, with the goal of supporting them through the early period before they are likely to get a research grant from the National Institutes of Health.

It could also provide funds for scientists who have already received their first government research grant and are seeking renewal, and so the new program could simply make the rich richer. But officials at the institute say the criteria for their program will be different enough to spread the wealth around.

The announcement comes amid protests against Congress's flat financing of the NIH for the last five years. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, and several other academic leaders and researchers plan to appear today at a hearing before the Senate Education Committee to outline the negative effects on young researchers of inadequate government funds.

In particular, it is becoming more and more difficult for researchers just entering their first faculty positions to obtain "R01" research grants, the most common type awarded by the NIH (The Chronicle, December 7, 2007). The grant-review process tends to favor older, more established researchers who already have a body of research to show. They are seen by the grant-awarding committees as less of a risk, said Howard H. Garrison, public-affairs director for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the largest coalition of biomedical-research groups in the United States (The Chronicle, December 21, 2007).

The goal of the new program is to open the pool of money to more scientists at an early stage, said Jack E. Dixon, the institute's vice president and chief scientific officer, when they are most likely to produce new and innovative ideas. (Emphasis mine.)

This is particularly helpful in this time of limited funding. Famine in scientific funding tends to hit young researchers disproportionately because they have less of a published papers to fall back on in grant applications. I don't know how much of an effect 70 researchers will have, but the support is definitely appreciated.