Interaction

February 15, 2006

The grants that make the research possible

Photo: L.A. Cicero

Chemist W.E. Moerner is principal investigator for a single molecule spectroscopy research group funded by
the National Institutes for Health.

Ever since Frederick B. Terman, dean of the School of Engineering, came up with his notion of steeples of excellence in the 1950s, research grants have fueled Stanford by drawing money and ensuring that the university remains the home of some of the world's greatest scientists.

Grants are still a prime source of energy for many Stanford schools and departments, and they are still on the rise. Sponsored research in fiscal year 2005 accounted for 37 percent of the university's operating revenue, or $973 million, up 5 percent from the previous year. A study by the National Science Foundation (NSF) released in July showed that Stanford spent $603 million on scientific research in 2003, $484 million of which came from the federal government.

Jeff Koseff

What's different about grants today and grants in Terman's day, aside from the raw numbers, is that today's are increasingly complicated and multifaceted. As multidisciplinary research becomes the rule in all scientific schools and departments, grants can get difficult to administer, on the one hand, but also can become more responsive to scientific needs and inquiry, on the other. The match is by no means perfect; researchers and grant makers sometimes seem to be in a race to stay apace of each other's agendas. But certainly the matchmaking is increasingly successful, and the results can be seen especially in Stanford's schools of Engineering and Medicine.

The NSF has embarked upon a variety of initiatives to encourage multidisciplinary research and training. Since the late 1980s, the agency has funded Science and Technology Centers, which bring together scientists from a broad range of disciplines. In 1995, the NSF set up an Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, whose name is self-explanatory (http://www.nsf.gov/mps/oma/about.jsp). A program specifically designed to help recent Ph.D.s acquire the cross-disciplinary training necessary for successful careers, the agency's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) since 1998 requires that applicants propose a comprehensive interdisciplinary theme.

More recently, the NSF funded an 18-month report titled "A Multi-Method Analysis of the Social and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplinary Collaboration." The report's principal investigator was Diana Rhoten, a Stanford Ph.D. in education, who now works at the Social Science Research Council (http://hybridvigor.net/publications.pl?s=interdis).

Though it is difficult to be precise about trends in federal multidisciplinary grant-giving, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2002 that spending on the NSF research centers (multidisciplinary by definition) had risen 76 percent from 1998, while the agency's budget as a whole rose 39 percent over the same time period.

In similar fashion, the Roadmap initiative of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) outlines the crucial importance of changing the nature of the grant-giving business by removing traditional barriers (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/researchteams/index.asp). The NIH provides more money than any other single source for university research nationwide.

"Although research teams have included individuals from multiple disciplines," the website states, "integrating different disciplines holds the promise of opening up currently unimagined scientific avenues of inquiry and, in the process, may form new disciplines with which to tackle increasingly complex questions. Planning for interdisciplinary research requires changes in all aspects of science conduct and support, including the training of investigators and development of new research methodologies."

To that end, the NIH, like the NSF, has over the past decade been funding multiple-year large team projects, sometimes called centers, sometimes called glue grants. Bringing together an array of scientists, medical researchers and social scientists, they often embrace several institutions and include training (and cross-training) as well as research funding. A new NIH translational research grant launched in October, for example, explicitly encourages medical schools to provide a home for disciplinary-based lab scientists.

It didn't use to be that way. Stanford's dean of research and graduate policy, Arthur Bienenstock, remembered when his Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory received its very first NSF funding in 1972. But the agency just wouldn't commit.

"It was like they were interested in sex without marriage," Bienenstock said. "They kept insisting on three-year renewals. There was no mechanism--we were driving the loop, we were pushing for a long-term multidisciplinary view, and it was clearly awkward for them."

But today, he laughed, "NIH almost looks like Bio-X!"

Though there are bumps along the NIH road, Stanford researchers are certainly going along for the ride. Chemist W. E. Moerner, for example, is principal investigator for a single molecule spectroscopy group funded by the NIH within its molecular libraries and imaging section (http://crisp.cit.nih.gov/crisp/CRISP_LIB.getdoc?textkey=6830933&p_grant_num=1P20HG003638-01&p_query=&ticket=11622963&p_audit_session_id=53455869&p_keywords=). Along with colleagues at Kent State University, the researchers at Stanford use lasers to observe single molecules and the proteins within them.

Moerner, biologist Lucy Shapiro and physicist Harley McAdams had all been working on a related project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

"When that project ended," Moerner said, "I had heard about the new NIH Roadmap program asking for bold ideas. And since we had already demonstrated single-molecule imaging, the goal was to do it better with brighter objects to make them more easily detectable."

The group needed new and better molecules. Enter Robert Twieg of Kent State University (http://dept.kent.edu/chemistry), who just happened to be developing such things. A sort of assembly line ensued, though each step of the way involved feedback from the rest. Twieg made the molecules, Moerner measured them to see if they were good enough, and Shapiro and McAdams studied their behavior within cells.

"Before the 1990s, we weren't able to follow molecules except over a large number of copies and then do the averaging," Moerner explained. "Now we can look closer and ask, Do all these molecules march to the same drummer?"

Similarly cross-disciplinary research is going on at other big universities, of course, but Stanford has an edge, said Moerner, who with Judith Frydman was a co-recipient of one of the first Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives grants in 2000.

"There are two aspects that make Stanford special," he said. "We have a close physical connection between the basic sciences, engineering and the medical community. They're all within a few hundred yards of each other. That is very rare, and the proximity really facilitates collaboration. The second aspect is that graduate students can cross departmental boundaries, so I have students in my lab from the physical sciences, applied physics, biophysics, etc., and they can all work together."

One of the biggest names in molecular imaging at Stanford is Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, director of the Molecular Imaging Program (http://mips.stanford.edu/). Gambhir has scored very big indeed with the NIH. A five-year, $10 million clinical research center grant (called a P50) was recently awarded to his group, which includes radiologists, physicists, mathematicians, oncologists, pediatricians, bioengineers, chemists, molecular pharmacologists and pathologists (http://sci3.stanford.edu/overview.html).

As for the bumps, they are of various sorts. Managing complicated multidisciplinary grants issued by labyrinthine and bureaucratic agencies is no easy task. It is sometimes a challenge just to make researchers aware that they can breach boundaries and that there is money available to do that. Chris Webb, a former genome scientist who stepped over into the administrative side of research, is in charge of helping professors at the School of Medicine put together multidisciplinary grants. He said he saw plenty of colleagues struggling to do research on their own, unable to figure out how to link up with others.

"They needed a nice cover story," he said, referring to the challenge of showing one researcher that her narrative, as it were, could also be part of someone else's story. Webb's boss, Senior Associate Dean for Research Harry Greenberg, added that "most researchers are already maxed out" with their own work, "so Chris is a bridge."

The School of Medicine pulls in more research money than any other unit at Stanford, and it generally takes care of its own grants. Like everything else, though, the story varies as one wanders across the campus.

Anne Hannigan

Stanford's other schools do not have someone like Webb, and Anne Hannigan, associate vice president for research administration, says she wishes they did. Her department does what it can, she said, but younger faculty members need more assistance.

"We don't serve them well. That's a goal of mine, to serve them better with research products," she said.

All in all, however, "Stanford is in good shape," she said. But financial administration of grants is a complicated business, with different incentives and disincentives across the university, and "the funding structure makes it more difficult for people to do business together."

For example, in the case of a proposal coming from more than one school (chemistry is in Humanities and Sciences, engineering is in Engineering, radiology is in Medicine and bioengineering straddles two schools), to which agency should they apply? (Medicine favors the NIH, Hannigan said, while Engineering favors the NSF.) Who should be the principal investigator, or PI? How should credit be apportioned? How should different departments and schools reconcile their accounting methods? (See sidebar for a discussion of multiple PIs.)

There is also the problem of money. More than one person interviewed for this story remarked gloomily that federal research budgets will remain flat for at least the short run. The Clinton administration in 1998 embarked upon a five-year plan to double the NIH's budget, a task completed under the first George W. Bush administration, but since then "we've seen a steady state at best," said Marcia Hahn of the agency's Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration. The agency's budget rose just 2 percent in 2005, below the rate of inflation for research.

The NSF budget request for 2006 represented about a 2.4 percent increase over its 2005 budget of $5.47 billion.

Jean Feldman of the NSF's office of Budget, Finance and Award Management promised the trend would not signal a qualitative change in funding priorities. "A good proposal is a good proposal," she said, referring to multidisciplinary grants, "but we'll be able to support less."

At the same time, the federal government is increasingly reluctant to reimburse universities for certain expenses. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which cited a study by the Council on Governmental Relations, research universities are losing several million dollars annually in unreimbursed costs. Overhead rates are not growing in tandem with research expenses.

"What I see is just more unfunded mandates coming down the line," Stanford's Bienenstock told the publication in August (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i48/48a01601.htm).

For Jeff Koseff, a civil and environmental engineer whose funding generally comes from the NSF, a shrinking pot is the decisive impediment to multidisciplinary research. Koseff, co-director of the Stanford Institute for the Environment, said the NSF's centers are sometimes less than what they appear to be, and he expressed optimism that the university to some degree will be able to make up the difference by funding adventurous multidisciplinary projects on its own.

But there's a clear limit to what universities can do, he said, and the financial onus must be on the federal government. University presidents "need to get together and make a statement and argue that [multidisciplinary environmental research] is important for the world," he insisted. Big corporations, if they could be made to see that their long-run interests are at stake (what happens when we run out of air, water and oil, for example?), undoubtedly would contribute, he said, and if they can be made to play by the same rules as the government regarding freedom of research and intellectual property, then Koseff sees no problem.

Beyond the question of resources, there are impediments of a more scholarly sort. There is a place for large-scale multidisciplinary research, some scientists say, but there also are drawbacks.

Like a lot of people, not all scientists enjoy working in large groups, at least not all the time. Greenberg at the School of Medicine said that in fact the best research is usually conducted by individuals. "Pound for pound, the School of Medicine is the best place in the world for grants," he said, and most of that money goes to individuals or very small groups.

James Ferrell, a biochemist and chair of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, also has his doubts, though, like Greenberg, he sees advantages on both sides.

"I'm ambivalent about interdisciplinary research," he said. "The upside is that it's always the case that on the boundaries of different disciplines and subdisciplines there's a chance to discover something that's really new. When you're in the middle, you discover incremental things. They're important, but exciting things happen at interfaces. So the idea that funding agencies might want to encourage this is appealing to me."

What can get lost, he said, is the intimacy of small-group research and the possibilities it allows. A teacher and a couple of postdocs with the same sort of training can easily shift direction, improvise, step around a problem as its contours change. A large interdisciplinary group cannot.

Yet Ferrell buys into multidisciplinary research sufficiently that he recently applied for a large consortium grant from the NIH in systems biology.

"My bet is that if we had some people with expert knowledge in multiple disciplines, people who could do computational and experimental biology, that would glue together the discipline and make us more effective, sort of like someone with an M.D. and a Ph.D.," said Ferrell, who himself has both degrees. "People who have real expertise in real physical and biological science are a real hope for the future. I don't really think you need to be a sophisticated biologist in the physical sciences. You can train people to do both."

Like Greenberg, though, Ferrell thinks it's easier to evaluate the scientific worth of research in small labs.

"Both NIH and NSF are trying to be progressive, but it's hard because nobody's got a great idea on how to separate a crackpot experiment from a real experiment," he said. "It's easy to tell if a project is definitely going to work--that's incremental science. It's harder to come up with ways to fund imaginative science."

(At times, multidisciplinary research at Stanford comes to resemble an ensemble performance. McAdams, of Woerner's team, also works with Ferrell. In October, McAdams won what he earlier had described as "a pretty darn big grant"--an $18 million Department of Energy microbiology award comprising a dozen researchers at six institutions. "Somebody has to take the bull by the horns," said the former Lockheed physicist, whose grant-writing ability has aided many colleagues, including his wife, molecular biologist Lucy Shapiro.)

If money and habits can get in the way of changes in research and funding practices, an even greater problem is the disjuncture between categories of knowledge and the structures that literally house those categories.

Rhoten's study for the NSF, which examined the interactions of researchers at five NSF-funded centers, suggested that physical and intellectual structures are not unrelated. For effective multidisciplinary research to take place, she and her colleagues found, centers cannot be "simple reconfigurations designed to attract new funds to old research." They must be populated by people characterized as "hubs" or as "bridges," people whose presence enables good research to take place not only because of their knowledge or ability but also because of their connections and attraction.

A virtual community will not do, in other words. A physical one is necessary. And the extent to which that physical community will be rooted in disciplines or not and how many walls will have to be torn down or left standing are among the stickiest quandaries facing the architects of the new multidisciplinarity.

For Byron Reeves, director of Media X and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, both of which study the interaction of humans and technology, disciplines are the guardians of details and they are essential.

"The biggest critique of interdisciplinary work is that people are fast and loose with the details," he said. Departments and disciplines ensure that researchers do not get sloppy. For that very reason, he's not enthusiastic about the prospect of interdisciplinary appointments.

Koseff, on the other hand, who says he knows no other way of working than in interdisciplinary teams, said that as long as programs and institutes such as his cannot hire faculty, they cannot progress. At present, they receive half-billets that are shared with departments, which then impose conditions. The interdisciplinary centers can appoint senior fellows, but not tenure-track faculty.

The relevance of this on funding is that the agencies are well aware that while they go about promoting research on the boundaries and in the interstices, the protagonists of that research reside in departments. If the protagonists are junior faculty, they may be under pressure to produce research that is more confined than they would wish. And regardless of their rank, they may be physically isolated from colleagues in other departments with whom they share projects and grant money.

Indeed, if for Koseff billets are the main impediment to interdisciplinary research at Stanford, for Greenberg it is physical space. What he called the "centerpieces" of the School of Medicine are four major multidisciplinary programs in search of a home. Private fundraising is under way to ensure that the physicians, lab scientists and computer scientists can truly cohabitate.

"Since the genome revolution, we've had a huge need for computer people, for cross-talk," he said. "The more you can mix people geographically, the better." And, he added, echoing an assessment in a 2004 National Academy of Sciences study on interdisciplinary research (http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11153.html), "students are the engine that creates interaction among the faculty." They physically travel from one lab to the next, cross-pollinating, spreading the word, carrying equipment and, at least figuratively, breaching walls.

Koseff's Institute for the Environment also is looking forward to having its own place, in the future Science and Engineering Quad. But, of course, that requires funding. So in the meantime, he's keeping busy. "Find a great problem, then find the people and work together," he said. "That's it."