NIH Unveils New Grant Program to Study Why NIH Grants Keep Disappearing
The agency's last research dollars will fund exactly one project: an investigation into itself.
Officials confirmed this week that the National Institutes of Health's remaining discretionary budget will be consolidated into a single competitive grant, open to any lab still operational enough to apply, dedicated entirely to determining why NIH grants have become so hard to get.
The winning proposal will receive the agency's full remaining funding, which reviewers say is enough to study the crisis but not enough to do anything about it. A second-place team will be invited to write a companion paper explaining why there wasn't enough funding for a second grant.
"We came together as one institution, divided," said a spokesperson for the review committee, before excusing themselves to attend a meeting about whether the committee could still afford to meet.
Researchers who spent decades studying disease mechanisms are reportedly retraining as funding-mechanism specialists, the only subfield left that the agency can still pay for. Several described the transition as seamless, since both fields now involve watching something disappear in real time and writing it down.
The study's final report, due whenever the money runs out, is expected to conclude that further research into the disappearance of research funding is needed, pending funding.