Mismatched expectations

Public funding for basic research rests on a delicate balance between scientists, governments and the public. COVID could further shift this equilibrium towards translation and application.

Keeping a research laboratory well‐funded to pay for salaries, reagents, infrastructure, travel, and publications is surely a challenging task that can consume most of a PI’s time. The risk is that if the funding decreases, the laboratory will have to shrink, which means less publications and a decreased probability of getting new grants. This downward spiral is hard to reverse and can end up with a token research activity and increased teaching instead. Some would see this is as an unwelcome career change. Apart from the personal challenge for PIs to keep the income flowing, there is no guarantee that the overall funding wallet for research will continue to grow and no certainty that the covenant between the funder and the funded will remain unchanged. The COVID‐19 pandemic could in fact accelerate ongoing changes in the way public funding for research is justified and distributed.There are three legs that support the delicate stool of competitive funding. The first is the scientists or, more precisely, the primary investigators. To get to that position, they had be high achievers as they moved from primary degree to PhD to post doc to the Valhalla of their own laboratory. Along the way they showed to be hard‐working, intelligent, competitive, innovative, lucky, and something between a team player and a team leader. The judgment to grant independence is largely based on publications—and given their track record of great papers to get there, most young PIs assume they will continue to get funding. This is not a narcissistic sense of entitlement; it is a logical conclusion of their career progression.They will get started by recruiting a few PhD or higher degree students. Although this is about educating students, a PI of course hopes that their students generate the results needed for the next grant application. The minimum time for a PhD is about three years, which explains that many grants are structured around a 3‐ to 5‐year research project. The endpoints are rarely the finishing line for a group’s overall research program: Hence, the comments in reviews along the line that “this paper raises more questions than it answers and more work will be required…” Work is carried on with a relay of grants edging asymptotically to answer a question raised decades before. I recall a lecturer from my PhD days who said that he would not do an obvious experiment that would prove or disprove his hypothesis, because “If I did that experiment, it would be the end of my career”. Others are less brazen but still continue to search for the mirage of truth when they know deep in their hearts that they are in a barren desert.The funding from the competitive grants is rarely enough to feed the ever‐growing demand for more people and resources and to make provisions for a hiatus in grant income. Eventually, an additional income stream comes from industry attracted by the knowledge and skills in the laboratory. The PI signs a contract for a one‐year period and allocates some resources to deliver the answers required when due. Similarly, some other resources are shepherded to fulfill the demands of a private donor who wants rapid progress on a disease that afflicts a loved one. The research group is doing a marathon run working on their core challenges with occasional sprints to generate deliverables and satisfy funders who require rapid success—a juggling act that demands much intellectual flexibility.State funding is the second leg and governments have multiple reasons for supporting academic research, even if these are not always presented clearly. Idealistically, the public supports research to add to the pool of knowledge and to understand the world in which we live but this is not how public funding started. The first universities began as theological seminars that expanded to include the arts, law, philosophy and medicine. Naturalists and natural scientists found them a serene and welcoming place to ponder important questions, conduct experiments, and discuss with their colleagues. The influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt who championed the concept of combining teaching and research at universities was immense: both became more professional with codified ways of generating and sharing knowledge. Government funding was an inevitable consequence: initially to pay for the education of students, it expanded to provide for research activities.While that rationale for supporting teaching and research remains, additional reasons for funding research emerged, mostly in the wake of World War 2: the military, national economies, and medicine required new products and services enabled by knowledge. It also required new structures and bodies to control and distribute public resources: hence the establishment of research funding agencies to decide which projects deserve public money. The US National Science Foundation was founded in 1950 following the analysis of Vannevar Bush that the country’s economic well‐being and security relied on research. The NIH extramural program started tentatively in the late 1930s. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) was established in 1951. The EU Framework Programmes started in 1984 with the explicit goal to strengthen the economy of the community. It was only in 2007 that the European Research Council (ERC) was established to support excellence in research rather than to look at practical benefits.But the tide is inevitably moving toward linking state research funding with return on investment measured in jobs, economic growth, or improved health. Increasingly, the rationale for government investment is not just generation of knowledge or publications, but more products and services. As science is seen as the driver of innovation and future economic growth, the goal has been to invest 3% or more of a country’s GDP into research—although almost two‐thirds of this money comes from industry in advanced economies. Even nations without a strong industrial base strive to strengthen their economies by investing in brains. This message about government’s economic expectations is not lost on the funding agencies and softly trickles down to selection committees, analysts, and program officers. The idealistic image of the independent scientist pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake no longer fits into this bigger picture. They are now cajoled into research collaborations and partnerships and, hooked to the laboratories’ funding habit, willingly promise that the outcome of the work will somehow have practical applications: “This work will help efforts to cure cancer”.The third leg that influences research directions is the public who pay for research through their taxes. Mostly, they do not get overly excited or concerned about those few percentages of the national budget that go to laboratories. However, the COVID‐19 crisis could change that: Now, the people in the white coats are expected to provide rapid solutions to pressing and complex problems. The scientists have so far performed extremely well: understanding SARS‐CoV‐2 pathology, genetics, and impact on the immune system along with diagnostic tests and vaccine candidates came in record time. Vaccine development moved with lightning speed from discovery of the crucial receptor proteins to mass‐producing jabs, employing many new technologies for the first time. 2020 has been a breath‐taking and successful year for scientists who delivered a great return on investment.The public have also seen what a galvanized and cooperative scientific community across disciplines can achieve. “Aha,” they may say, “why don’t you now move on to tackle triple‐negative breast cancer, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s?” This is a fair and challenging question. And the increasing involvement of consumers and patients in research, at the behest of funding agencies, will further this expectation until the researchers respond. And respond they will, as they have always done to every hint of what might be needed to obtain funding.The old order is changing. The days of the independent academics getting funding for life to do what they like in the manner they chose will not survive the pressures from government to show a return on investment and from society to provide solutions to their problems. The danger is that early‐stage research—I did not say “basic” as it has joined “academic” as a pejorative term—will be suffocated. Governments appoint the heads of funding agencies, and it is not surprising if the appointees share the dominant philosophy of their employer. Peer‐review committees are being discouraged, subtly, from supporting early‐stage research. Elsewhere, the guidelines for decisions on grant applications give an increasing score for implementation, translation, IP generation, and so on. Those on the panels get the message and bring it back to their institutions that slowly move away from working to understand what we are ignorant about to using our (partial) understanding to develop cures and drugs.As in all areas, balance is needed. Those at the forefront of translating knowledge into outcomes for society have to remind the public as well as the government that the practical today is only possible because of the “impractical” research of yesterday. Industry is well aware of this and has become a strong champion for excellent early‐stage research to lay the groundwork for solving the next set of hard problems in the future. The ERC and its national counterparts have a special role to play in highlighting the benefits of supporting research with excellence as the sole criterion. In the meantime, scientists have to embrace the new task of developing solutions to societal problems without abandoning the hard slog of innovative research that opens up new understanding from which flows translation into practical applications.