Stimulus Becomes a Life Line

Early last year, Harvard Medical School professor Timothy Mitchison pulled aside two scientists employed in his lab. Without more funding soon, Mitchison told them, he would have to let them go.

Today, thanks to a grant funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, which allocated $21.5 billion for research and development—the two still have their jobs.

Harvard has received more than $150 million in stimulus funding, which supported roughly 200 projects like Mitchison’s, according to Kevin Casey, the University’s chief lobbyist.

With spending from the National Institutes of Health declining in real terms over the past five years, competition for grant money has been fierce, and the percentage of successful NIH grant applications dropped from 32 percent in 1999 to 22 percent in 2008.

The recent injection of stimulus dollars, Harvard researchers and administrators say, has been an important lifeline.

“It’s been a little bit like Lipitor for the federal research system, unclogging the clogged arteries of research,” Casey says. “There is a lot of excitement around the country about the progress that will be made.”

But even as the Obama Administration proposed an additional increase in funding for NIH and National Science Foundation research grants in the 2011 budget this week, some researchers at the University are still concerned about the availability of financial support going forward.

‘SHOVEL-READY’ PROJECTS

Federal support for university-based research came amidst Harvard’s ongoing efforts to push for increased funding for the sciences.

University President Drew G. Faust testified before a Senate committee in 2008, stressing the importance of bolstering the NIH budget, which had flatlined since 2005.

Harvard lobbyists—working with a consortium of other universities and agencies while legislators drafted the stimulus bill last year—argued that research plays an important role in driving economic growth and development.

Basic science research creates jobs, and innovation serves as “a catalyst for ongoing stimulus,” Casey says.

By the time federal agencies had given additional research funding a green light, Harvard administrators and researchers had less than two years to submit grant proposals and spend stimulus money.

The Obama administration’s focus on “shovel-ready” projects meant that many Harvard researchers were able to move forward on projects that were not fully funded at the time.

Researchers awarded stimulus grants were able to start working “almost immediately,” Mitchison says—unlike in previous years, when they often waited a few months to receive the funds.

Mitchison and his team received a $999,932 grant from NIH in September to investigate which cancer drugs will be successful early in their development.

According to the stipulations of the grant, he will be required to submit quarterly progress reports, detailing the number of jobs created and saved and how he is spending the stimulus funds.

“It’s an unusual degree of scrutiny, but positive scrutiny,” Mitchison says.

To help Harvard researchers navigate the process of applying for and spending stimulus funds, Harvard’s first Vice Provost for Research David Korn ’54 and his staff launched a site with up-to-date information on new grants as they became available over the summer.

By October, Harvard had submitted more than 700 grant proposals—about 200 of which were awarded, totaling roughly $154 million.

“I don’t think I’ve had a direct, active role,” Korn says. “[The faculty] have to write the grants and go through a stringent peer review, but I think Harvard has done extremely well in the number of grants received.”

Harvard’s peer research institutions also took their share of the federal funds, with Johns Hopkins University receiving $160.3 million, Yale taking home $121 million, and Stanford netting $119 million.

SAVING JOBS

For Juraj Farkas and Shichun Huang, research associates at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, the jobs preserved by the stimulus funds are their own.

With a $53,000 grant from NSF, the pair embarked on their first independent research project in Sept. 2009. Using Harvard’s million-dollar mass spectrometer, they are studying calcium isotopes in rocks in order to better understand geological history.

Unlike many tenured professors, research associates—a position equivalent to a postdoctoral fellow—typically do not have a continuous stream of funding. Farkas says that obtaining grants as a junior researcher has always been difficult, but the stimulus package presented a unique opportunity.

“It’s always been hard to get funded,” Huang says. “We have to show them we’re able to do this.”

MOVING FORWARD

Astronomy professor Jonathan E. Grindlay was pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call in September notifying him of a $772,000 NSF grant award—$231,000 more than he asked for.

Grindlay had sought funding to digitize glass plate images of stars held at the Harvard Observatory—a project that will ultimately require $3 or 4 million, he says.

Though the Obama Administration’s 2011 budget proposal bolsters funding for NIH and NSF by 3.2 and 8 percent respectively, other agencies—including NASA—are unlikely to see a budget increase, Grindlay says.

As Grindlay, who currently employs about six people working part time in his lab, was not sure whether astrophysics research will be covered by the budget increases, he is seeking private donors to support the project’s completion.

“It seems domestic basic research is [a priority] and for that were pleasantly surprised,” Casey says after arriving in Washington Monday night to seek lawmakers’ support for Obama’s budget proposal. “We look forward to defending that on the Hill.”

He adds that research funding has had bipartisan support in the past.

For now, Mitchison has secured enough funding to continue his project for another five years—and hire an additional technician.

But he says he suspects that the current spike in federal investment in research and development is only temporary.

“At some point [research spending] can’t keep growing more than the economy,” he says. “I certainly would have other priorities, as well as science, as to how my tax dollars get spent.”

—Staff writer William N. White can be reached at wwhite@fas.harvard.edu.