It’s 2017 again at the NIH

It’s 2017 again: the Gorillaz are topping charts, Star Wars is in theaters, and the NIH is discussing a potential cap on the number of grants a single PI can hold at once. Last week the agency published an RFI floating potential caps at two, three, or four simultaneous research project grants, with the stated goals of spreading funding more widely across labs, institutions, and researchers, and supporting more early- and mid-career scientists.

The agency’s last attempt at this – the 2017 Grant Support Index, which would’ve capped support at roughly three R01s’ worth of funding – was dropped within a month following pushback from elite universities. Last week’s RFI cites a handful of metascience papers in support (specifically showing diminishing marginal returns to additional funding, and reduced disruption as a function of team size), though in my view the metascientific jury is still out on the cost-benefit of a hard cap; getting more money to younger scientists seems like the strongest case for the cap, but cases against include diverting funding from meritorious proposals, increasing process burden, and making large-team science more difficult to sustain. Since 2017, the agency has tried a few other approaches for achieving these goals, including a dedicated fund for early- and mid-career scientists (which directly replaced the GSI when it was dropped) and a softer version of a cap at NIGMS, in which explicit justification is required for funding above a certain threshold. STAT has a good overview of the background and the various perspectives. Responses to the RFI are due August 3.