Indiana University School of Medicine Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Dean for Research Mentoring Aaron Carroll in a blog post published on the Incidental Economist says the U.S. medical research grant system could be failing.
Research funding has been getting progressively more difficult to achieve, Carroll writes, adding that a study published in JAMA in 2015 found that funding saw only a 0.8 percent annual increase between 2004-12.
“Because the money available for research doesn’t go as far as it used to, it now takes longer for scientists to get funding,” Carroll writes.
Carroll points to the small minority, about 20 percent, of postdoctoral candidates who achieve tenure at a university through R01-level funding.
“This new reality can be justified only if those who are weeded out really aren’t as good as those who remain,” he writes. “Are we sure that those who make it are better than those who don’t?”
Click here to read Carroll’s full blog post on the Incidental Economist.
