Category: intramural program

Bethesda Maryland…

I’m headed for a meeting in Bethesda this afternoon. As many readers know, I was a postdoc at the NIH after I graduated with my PhD from Michigan in 1987. I also lived there for six years at a time before 9/11 when the campus of NIH will still wide-open, more like a college than the federal installation that it is.

NIH (and here I’m referring to the intramural program that has a campus in Bethesda) has faced many challenges over the years and has managed to thrive in spite. It’s a place that structurally facilitates the sort of high-risk, high-payoff research made possible by freeing investigators from the need to constantly be writing new grant applications.

When I was there, the real limit on my research was my own imagination– in stark contrast to the challenges that young investigators often face in the academy.

All of this may soon be at real risk as the US faces the so called “fiscal cliff” next January. The biomedical research at NIH is one of the few government programs that has maintained real bipartisan support over the years since the World War II. The reason is of course, that NIH makes a real difference in the everyday lives of Americans and…that it just plain works.

Francis Collins takes the controls

Science Insider has the story. Money quote:

Asked about NIH’s intramural program, he is “resistant to the idea that [the program] is in need of some sort of dramatic redo” but is pondering whether to create a pool of intramural money that, like NIH’s Common Fund, could be used to fund crosscutting research quickly.

This is really interesting. We periodically hear the meme that somehow the intramural program is in trouble. I’ve always suspected it’s partly driven by envy (intramural scientists don’t have to apply for grants like those of us in the extramural community). But Collins standing up for the intramural program is refreshing and the idea of a rapidly deployable intramural pool is great.

Jim