Dear Mr. President: Please Stop With These Science "Moonshots"
During this week's State of the Union address, President Obama announced that his Vice President Joe Biden will lead a new science "moonshot" to put an end to cancer. According to an article on Medium posted by the Vice President, this will do two things: increase resources devoted to fighting cancer and break down barriers that prevent sharing of information among cancer researchers.
The announcement drew a lot of praise from pundits—the snarkier Twitter commentators out there pointed out that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) failed to clap at this, marking him as heartless. More funding for cancer research sounds like a total no-brainer, doesn't it? There's just one problem—it's a terrible idea.
At this point, let me give you a little background on where this editorial is coming from. It might be hard to understand why the car editor at a technology website is whining about science funding, but before moving to Ars full-time in June last year, I spent six years working in a policy office at the National Institutes of Health. It's a job that gave me a front row seat into how science policy actually works in the United States. Before that, I spent another six years as a research scientist, during which time I served in a couple of leadership roles with the National Postdoctoral Association (I also used to write science content for Ars, starting back in 2004).
What follows is my opinion, but it's informed by over a decade of experience in the trenches (and a straw poll of friends and colleagues indicates to me I'm not off-base). However, it will annoy everyone I know working in advocacy. Here goes.
Mr. President and Mr. Vice President: science doesn't need another moonshot, and it really doesn't need another vaguely thought-out initiative dropped on it during a State of the Union address. What it needs is much more important—and probably much more difficult politically, because those needs are much less flashy. What science needs is stable, sustainable budget growth. Take the NIH budget and promise to grow it at a percent or two above inflation for a number of years. The number 10 would be good.
It's not a flashy plan, but flashy draws time, energy, and resources away from the important jobs people are already trying to do.
Don't get me wrong. Done correctly, history shows that lofty scientific and engineering challenges can work. The actual moonshot for example, or the Human Genome Project. Both of those had one thing in common: a clear and well-defined goal at the beginning. "Before 1970, fly someone to the Moon and return them safely." "Sequence the entire human genome."
Nebulous concepts like "end all cancer" get good applause—curing all cancers is right up there with sunshine and puppies. But such concepts are effectively meaningless. Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer back in 1971. The National Cancer Institute is the largest of all NIH institutes and in Fiscal Year 2016 its budget is $5.1 billion (out of NIH's total of $31 billion). Is the implication that that money is just being wasted right now? That it was insufficient all along, and nobody cared or realized?
I'd argue we're not wasting money, and that we're doing a better job of treating many cancers now than ever before. Immunotherapies have made previously lethal conditions like metastatic melanoma into treatable diseases where some patients go into full remission. Large-scale DNA sequencing efforts like The Cancer Genome Atlas have revealed that what we used to think of as a single monolithic disease (breast cancer or lung cancer) is actually tens or hundreds of different conditions and shown us how to treat some of them in ways we hadn't thought of before.
Cancer isn't even the leading cause of death in US! Almost twice as many die each year from heart disease, stroke, or lung disease, yet the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute gets $2 billion a year less than NCI.
Stop giving the system more money than it can safely absorb
So what's wrong with this idea, and why am I coming off like a cranky old man shouting at the clouds? For one thing, history has shown us that giving science a large slug of cash in a very short amount of time has horrible—some might say disastrous—consequences. This was plain to see after the NIH budget got doubled between 1998 and 2003 (something I and my colleagues wrote about extensively here at Ars). It was even more obvious once the two-year bolus of money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2011) was spent.
Think about the way a sudden influx of nutrients causes algae to bloom and then die off in rivers and oceans, leaving dead zones behind. Rapid injections of cash into the research enterprise create intense periods where there's lots of money available for lots of new scientists to get hired. But once those initial grants run out, there is no more funding to support them.
As a result of the past booms in funding, you will find empty lab after empty lab in research institutes and universities all over the land. We've trained far more scientists than we have money to sustainably support.
Steady, stable, predictable budget growth would solve this problem. And it's not just me saying that. Two years ago, four of the highest-profile scientific leaders in the country (then-editor of Science Bruce Alberts, then-head of NCI and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, then-president of Princeton Shirley Tilghman, and founding chair of systems biology at Harvard Marc Kirschner) made sustainability their very first recommendation in a paper calling for the US to fix the systemic flaws in the way we do science.
Unfortunately, this isn't the first or even second time we've had a poorly defined science project dropped on us by the current, well-meaning occupant of the White House. In 2013, we got the BRAIN Initiative. Last year it was the Personalized Medicine Initiative.
In both cases, the pattern was flashy announcement first, followed by a year or more of meetings, workshops, and conference calls where researchers and policy makers had to sit down and work out what the actual scientific questions were supposed to be and what could they actually accomplish with the amounts of money on offer (which in both cases I'd argue were inadequate for the problem at hand).
In my final year at NIH, I saw all the consequences all too well. Colleagues lost weeks of time to planning meetings at a time when we were already understaffed for the day-to-day challenge of keeping the wheels on the science bus. All the while, funding rates for NIH grants dropped into the single digits, and labs closed up shop as scientists gave up on their dreams and went to work in more stable careers.
Which brings me back to my initial point. The way to improve the health of our nation isn't another moonshot where we're not quite sure what we even mean by "Moon." Just find a way to deliver predictable, sustainable funding.
I promise you, the scientists will do the rest.
Jonathan M. Gitlin / Jonathan is the automotive editor at Ars Technica, covering all things car-related. Jonathan lives and works in Washington, D.C.