More Time for Science and Less Time for Administration?

Abstract

That is the question posed, among other cognate issues, by the Alexander–Murray Bill introduced by the leadership of the Senate Health Committee. In the midst of a raucous political season that can only be characterized as highly unusual, to say the least, this bipartisan duo has remarkably and insightfully targeted an increasing problem for the scientific community, namely the never ending and expanding administrative burden of conducting scientific research in the United States. Between the demands from each NIH Institute, and the Divisions within individual institutes, and a researcher’s institution—often compounded by reports to both individual schools (eg, medicine or public health, and the university as a whole), individual entities within the university (eg, IRB, IACUC), not to mention, individual hospital systems (eg, Veterans Administration, university hospitals, community and county hospitals)—the labyrinthine nature of the requisite reporting is substantial. Add to these the frequent scheduled and random audits that require many hours of attention, and are often announced by frightening language that proclaim the power to shut down research programs for non-compliance, and one can begin to realize that this is far from an ideal situation in which the spirit of discovery can thrive. Both the bill’s sponsor and the authors of this commentary recognize, of course, the need for rigorous oversight of scientific research—the paramount importance of strictly abiding to the protection of human and laboratory animal subjects in research, the need to be transparent about potential conflicts of interest, and to be vigilant about scientific misconduct. This administrative burden not only weighs heavily on current funded investigators but serves as a negative influence on junior investigators who, witnessing the dwindling research time of their senior colleagues, coupled with the difficult funding climate, are too easily dissuaded from moving forward in an academic career. In addition, the cost burden falls upon taxpayers, who want their NIH to facilitate rapid-paced development of cures, but instead are seeing subtractions from what is available for research activities in the name of creating and maintaining new layers of oversight upon scientists.