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The notion of hotspots for scientific research in the US is not a new concept. When I left Jerusalem for postdoctoral studies in the US nearly 15 years ago, my PhD mentor had carefully explained to me that to succeed in academia, I would need not only to find a top-rate lab and mentor and be highly productive in that lab, but I would need to do it in the right geographic location. The four major centres that my mentor and others recommended were hubs of research in the Boston area (Harvard, MIT and affiliated research centers), the New York area (NYU, Yeshiva University, Columbia, Cornell, etc.), the Maryland area (National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins), and the San Francisco and San Diego areas (University of California) on the west coast.
To be fair, this is certainly a very over-simplified and inaccurate depiction of the situation, and there are a wealth of terrific major centres in the US outside these areas that include, but are not limited to Houston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Chicago and many others. But the key phrase that was batted around at the time was critical mass: that it was necessary for there to be enough scientists for prestigious high-level research and subsequent recognition.
OK – that was sage advice for postdoctoral fellows coming to a new country. In my case, it worked (although the control of me having a parallel life is lacking): I ended up at NIH and then found a faculty position in the American midwest. But is the critical mass becoming increasingly polarised between the two coasts and the rest of the research centres in the US? I fear that it is.
The crunch in research funding is taking its toll. When money is tight, and competition fierce, biases that might not normally surface seem to push their way out of the bottle. And once the genie has been unleashed, getting it back under control is not so simple.
I will only bring a couple of anecdotal instances to light, highlighting my concern of being permanently branded second-tier in my home base of the American midwest. In grant applications sent to the NIH (the major funding source of biomedical research in the US), there are five criteria to be judged and scored individually – with a composite score given that does not necessarily reflect an average of the five categories. These categories are loosely defined as: 1) The researcher and her/his qualifications and track record, 2) The significance of the research, 3) Innovation, 4) Approach (this is usually the key category, because it includes the quality of the preliminary results and research plan, 5) Environment.
A couple of years ago, I found myself complaining to a friend and colleague who has a lab at a very prestigious institution, and I mentioned to her that my scores for "environment" were depressingly mediocre, and that I had concerns that my overall impact and proposal scores were being influenced by the fact that I do not work at one of the super-prestigious institutions. My colleague immediately agreed with me, telling me that after Hurricane Katrina, a researcher from the Louisiana area joined her prestigious department, and told her that suddenly proposals that had not obtained good scores when sent from Louisiana were doing great after being sent from her new department. Coincidence? Like a detective, I don't believe in coincidences.
Around this time, a very talented student in the lab submitted a student fellowship proposal to NIH. The criteria for these fellowships are very similar, except for a big section that takes into account the mentor and her/his track record in research and mentorship. When the critiques finally came back, with a good score, but one outside the range of funding, I was shocked to find that one of the key issues noted by the main reviewer was "the environment". There were no positive comments about the environment, and effectively a single negative one. The reviewer took the time to search my medical centre's ranking in the US News and World Report, and then made the following statement: "Based on total funding, the university is only ranked #66 out of 93 medical schools in the US".
I found this insufferable, to say the least. First, what does the ranking of my medical school – a modestly-sized school in a state with a small population – have to do with the availability of equipment and intellectual environment for a student to succeed? Second, does "total funding" have any meaning? If anything, although I would argue that this is also meaningless, wouldn't funding per researcher be a better standard? And of course, if I have sufficient funding and an environment set up for a student to thrive, why should the funding of others at my institute have any impact? The "environment," after all, is to ensure that the applicant has the necessary facilities, equipment, space and intellectual support to thrive. So if my lab provides that, what else would the student need?
I complained. I'm quite good at that – after all, you don't get to my position without being good at complaining! But the irony of this situation is that I served for several years on the very committee that reviewed my student's proposal. So in my complaint, I just happened to mention that if a member of my institute (me) is qualified enough to review proposals, then why should a student in my lab be virtually disqualified from receiving from receiving such an award? It doesn't make sense.
I believe that none of these biases and discriminations against institutions would ever have come to light if researchers were not forced to elbow each other for every nickel and dime. But this seems to be the way-of-the-world. After all, when the economy is good, immigrants are generally not picked on. But history shows that when the economy sours, the natives eagerly look out for themselves. We can only hope that increased support for scientific research will help put the bias genie back in the bottle.
It is just as important to have diversity in institutional research funding as it is in having diversity in individual applicants. Otherwise, we will have two coasts, and a vast scientific wilderness in between.
Steve Caplan is a biomedical researcher with a lab working on endocytic protein trafficking. He is another Occam's Typewriter regular and tweets as @caplansteve
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