Scientists leaving labs and heading for cubicles

• Young biomedical researchers are increasingly less likely to succeed in basic research careers
• National Institutes of Health grant success rates fall below historical lows
• Experts call for more training to equip young researchers for careers in industry or outside the lab

So long, laboratory, hello cubicle. Fading research funds amid a federal budget fight may signal the disappearance of the days of the lone medical researcher making brilliant discoveries, research experts warn.

The funding shortage is shunting more young scientists away from the labs that perform basic research in biology or other disciplines, the traditional home for newly minted Ph.D.s. Instead they are increasingly headed to industry jobs that offer steady hours but forgo the thrill of making discoveries.

The federal government is the leading source of basic research funding nationwide, money that fuels scientific investigations of fundamental questions of biology, chemistry, physics and similar disciplines. The feds provide more than $30 billion in basic research grants to scientists yearly, half of it roughly in medical research from the National Institutes of Health.

The odds that biomedical researchers will score an NIH grant have fallen to about 20% in the past decade, a historical low at the $31 billion biomedical research center. Most of those grants go to established labs run by older researchers, so much so that 7% of lab chief grants go to researchers 65 years or older while only 3% go to ones under 36 years old. Now that President Obama signed into law a federal spending measure that locks the federal budget "sequester" cuts into place, a mandatory $54 billion in basic research funds will be cut across agencies in the next five years, estimates the American Association for the Advancement of Science, based in Washington.

In that case, grant success rates will probably plummet to about 10%, NIH chief Francis Collins has estimated.

"For young researchers, the sequester is just one more load on the camel's back after years of seeing fewer chances at funding," says Boston College biologist David Burgess. "Most of my graduate students are figuring on careers in industry, while the younger students are hearing horror stories about funding and may steer away from science completely."

Only 26% of students with newly minted doctorates in biomedical disciplines end up in an academia, the traditional route to pursuing basic research,according to a 2012 NIH panel headed by Princeton President Shirley Tilghman. The average age of those researchers getting their first lab chief grant has risen from the early 30s in the 1970s to the early 40s today, meaning most new lab chiefs are middle-aged when they start the struggle for tenure — publish or perish — at universities. In response to the report, the NIH announced this month that it was starting a "Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training" program, designed to give 15 labs money to "broaden" graduate student awareness of careers outside academic labs.

Unemployment among people with doctorates is very low, about 3.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and even lower among scientific disciplines. Many of those highly educated individuals trained to do lab research find that career blocked, Burgess says, even though they are conducting research that would have received funding in past decades.

In 2010, Congress reauthorized the "America Competes" law, which sought to add funds to education and research at agencies outside the NIH, such as the National Science Foundation, after a push by Silicon Valley luminaries such as Intel's Andy Grove for more technical training for U.S. workers. All those agencies are hit by sequester cuts.

"There are many career options for biomedical Ph.D.s, nearly all equally valuable to society, but the problem is that our training system was designed when need, supply and demand were very different," says American Society for Cell Biology chief Stefano Bertuzzi. Because of the stigma of "failure" attached to heading to industry among young scientists, he says, many stay in low-paying "post-doctoral" lab positions for years while pursuing decreasing numbers of academic lab jobs. At ages when past professors were doing Nobel Prize-quality work in their own labs, many of today's post-docs are just getting their footing as workers in older professor's facilities, Bertuzzi says. "This is fundamentally wrong."

At Boston College, two new faculty biomedical positions attracted 350 or so applicants, Burgess says. "Terrific people are applying for these jobs, we could only interview six, and we had to turn away many tremendously talented applicants," he says.

As much as Congress, universities and scientists themselves "share responsibility for creating an even more serious problem as a result of their actions and decisions over the past four decades," says biologist Henry Bourne of the University of California-San Francisco, writing Tuesday in the eLife journal.

In the late 1940s, the federal government began supporting university research in a big way, adding to a boom in research in the post-Sputnik years that lasted into the 1970s. That came even as industries did away with large basic research labs of their own, such as the famous Bell Labs facilities that produced Nobel Prizes and innovations such as the transistor. A doubling of the NIH budget a decade ago has given way to flat budgets in the past decade. Grant sizes declined with inflation, and the NIH announced last year that it would provide only 90% of promised funds to grantees, a policy made permanent by the sequester. During the good times, schools overbuilt labs and graduated too many young scientists, thinking research funds would always increase. Instead, the top universities, which can afford to recruit researchers getting grants from smaller schools and provide them with more equipment, are increasingly receiving a larger share of NIH grant funds, crowding out researchers at state schools who face strained budgets and more classroom obligations.

"In short, we are eating our seed corn," Bertuzzi says, noting that many advanced and developing nations, especially in Asia, are ramping up their investments in science and technology. China increased its scientific publications by 16% from 1997 to 2005, and Singapore by more than 10%. "The economy of today and of tomorrow will be greatly damaged by a shutdown of innovation," Bertuzzi says.