Research in a No-Growth Economy—Can Excellence Be Preserved?

RESEARCH IN A NO-GROWTH ECONOMY—CAN EXCELLENCE BE PRESERVED? DE WITT STETTENJR.* Many of us are very badly spoilt. By "us" I mean the generation of senior research scientists. By "spoilt" I mean that we have been privileged to mature in an era during which there has been a fairly regular annual increase in the number of dollars available for the support of our activities. We have grown accustomed to an expanding research economy and have given scant consideration to how we might survive under more adverse circumstances. From time to time, wise voices from the sidelines told us that an annual 15 percent increase in the budget for research and an annual 6 percent increase in the gross national product could not concurrently persevere forever. One could, if one felt so inclined, extrapolate to the point in time when all of the federal budget would be directed toward scientific research. What would happen during the ensuing years was conjectural. Despite such chilling forecasts, we blithely went ahead assuming year by year that the increase in the federal appropriation for scientific research would always take care of our needs. This failing is entirely human, and it resembles the widespread assumption that, although we were pumping fossil fuels out of the earth far more rapidly than they were being generated, the supply would never be exhausted. In both of these areas we have come to a rude awakening. The conviction that the world's petroleum supply is susceptible of exhaustion has gradually come upon us, and we now frequently encounter estimates of the rate at which we are approaching zero reserve asymptotically. Similarly, we have gradually come to the conclusion that it is possible that the funds available for the support of research may, indeed, level off or even decline. This perception was delayed somewhat because the appropriation is always given to us in current dollars and therefore includes the cost of inflation. When, as is shown in figure 1, the support of biomedical re- *Senior Scientific Advisor, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20205. Copyright is not claimed for this article. Perspectives inBiology andMedicine · Spring 1980 | 357 56,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0 TOTALS IN CURRENT AND CONSTANT (1968) DOLLARS)* CURRENTS CONSTANT $ _______f---------------------- 53,092 _L _L _L J____L $5,526 '68 '69 70 '71 72 73 74 75 76 77 Fig. 1.—Total national support for health, research, and development search is calculated in constant (1968) dollars, it at once becomes startlingly apparent that since 1974 the increase in support very precisely matches the inflationary process. The support in constant dollars has been entirely flat and may well continue flat for the years ahead. Is it possible that the recognition that our petroleum reserves were less than infinite may have precipitated a conservatism in the expenditure of funds for biomedical research? Many other data could be cited, but they all monotonously lead to the same conclusion that, once the appropriate "deflators" are applied to the current appropriations, the real dollars available for research support are not increasing. This is a novel situation which presents new problems and will require new and imaginative solutions. In the ensuing discussion, I shall draw chiefly upon the experience at the National Institutes of Health. Similar problems and similar solutions, however, will surely be encountered in other agencies which conduct and support research in areas other than biology and medicine. Let us briefly review some of the characteristic habits which we developed during the happy and profligate days gone by. Secure in the knowledge that each succeeding year would provide us with more dollars than we had at present, we felt that we could—and indeed should— indulge in certain luxuries. Whenever new buildings were needed, funds were available for construction. We were assured that, if the building ceased to be highly functional, new funds could at some later date be provided either to modernize the existing building or perhaps replace it. Our attitude toward scientific manpower was similarly cavalier. Some of our colleagues were most productive when they surrounded themselves with large numbers of Ph.D. candidates, and since abundant job openings were continuously developing...