With an annual budget of more than $37 billion, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plays a critical role in funding scientific endeavors in biomedicine. Funding innovative science is an essential element of the NIH’s mission, but the ability to fulfill this aim has been questioned. Based on an analysis of a comprehensive corpus of published biomedical research articles (more than 24,000,000 of them in the MEDLINE database), a study was conducted to measure whether the NIH succeeds in funding work with novel ideas, referred to as “edge science.” The results are described in the June 2, 2020 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. As background, it may be worth noting that both scientific and political considerations may lead the NIH to underfund trying out new ideas. First, because the NIH visibly spends public money, it needs to show discrete manifestations of improvements in health, as well as technological breakthroughs, arising from its supported research. This consideration can lead to a preference to support ideas that already have shown promise, rather than edge science. Second, NIH scientific review panels, for reasons related to their constitution, tend to reward projects that evidently are feasible over novel projects.
This investigation shows that edge science is more often NIH-funded than less novel science, but with a delay. Papers that build on more recent ideas are NIH-funded less often than are papers that build on ideas that have had a chance to mature for at least seven years. Three key findings are: First, the tendency to fund edge science is limited mostly to basic science. Papers that build on novel clinical ideas are not more often NIH-funded than are papers that build on well-established clinical knowledge. Second, novel papers tend to be NIH-funded more often because there are more NIH-funded papers in innovative areas of investigation, rather than because the NIH funds innovative papers within research areas. Third, the NIH’s tendency to have funded papers that build on the most recent advances has declined over time. In this regard, NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects. Given the focus in this particular study on published papers, the findings reflect both the funding preferences of the NIH and the composition of the applications it receives.
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