Physicist Amok

Everyone talks about how the NIH funding system is broken. I rarely see numbers besides falling success rates. No one ever talks about real numbers such as the cost of the current system. How much do grants actually cost?

I have tried for a conservative estimate. The real cost may be anywhere from a third again as large to twice as large.

I have left out airfares for professors to attend study sections, paychecks of the bureaucrats, panels to assign grants to institutes, heads of study sections, time spent in study sections, and a wealth of other costs. Some of these are absorbed in the total award cost NIH reports for grants, since half of most grants disappears into overhead, both for the NIH and the institution which receives it.

How long does writing and reviewing take? How much does it cost? I assume $150/h as the going rate. This is what my mother, a professional science writer, charges. MDs and PhDs on the same projects regularly bill $200-$300 an hour. She estimates producing a document takes 2.5h/page and costs $375/page. Reviewing or editing a document takes 0.2h/page and costs $30/page.

An NIH R01 grant — the backbone of the funding system — is 25 pages long. In 2006, the average success rate (counting all repeat submissions as a single grant) was 0.128 (weighting new and continued grants by the number of each). The average award size with the same weighting was $363,731.08.

Each grant gets four reviewers. 25 pages takes 5h and costs $750. Writing it takes 62.5h and costs $9,375. The total cost for a single grant is 4*$750 + $9375 = $12,375. The time for a single grant is 82.5h. We can assign the reviewing cost without worrying about where in detail it should be counted: the reviewers are grant-seeking scientists as well, and someone must review their grants, so this is a shared cost in the community.

A success rate of 0.128 means we need to submit 7.81 grants in order to get one funded. Each R01 gets three resubmissions (which are still counted as one submission in the NIH statistics). Anecdotally, nothing is getting funded right now on first submission, so we have to multiply the expected number of grants by three, or 23.44 grant equivalents.

The mean cost of a successful grant is $290,039.06. The mean time for a successful grant is 1,933.8h. A full time job of 40h a week, 52 weeks a year is 2080h. Getting a grant is 0.93 of a full time job. It is 0.8 of the first year of the average grant size mentioned above, and remember that most of that money doesn’t make it to the professor at all. A full professor can reasonably ask for $220,000 a year. The first year and a third of the grant is eaten by the costs of getting the grant.

The final summary:
Cost of a grant: $290,039.06
Annual award of a grant: $220,000
Time to get a grant: 1,933.8h
Full time job: 2080h/year

Before we wade in to fix this, let’s set a target for what constitutes “fixed.” I say reduce cost and time to a tenth of their current value. Then we should develop a set of possible systems, and run controlled, randomized experiments to compare them.