Scientists advising the National Institutes of Health suggested a five-year time limit for postdoctoral support and a rise in funding for intermediate positions such as staff scientist.Credit: Ariana Drehsler/AFP/Getty
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering limiting postdoctoral researchers to a maximum of five years of financial support from the agency. The idea is a bid to improve the working conditions and job prospects of early-career researchers, but has prompted a heated debate about its potential effects.
Some researchers say that the five-year cap and other restrictions that the agency is weighing up could perpetuate inequities in the biomedical workforce and discourage researchers from continuing in academia. Rigid time limits also send the message “that science has to be done very quickly”, says Anna Cliffe, a virologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville. “Science is not always fast.”
The NIH, which is based in Bethesda, Maryland, put out a request on 25 July for feedback about the ideas, and has acknowledged the concerns raised so far. The aim “for taking such a step would be to accelerate the career transition for these researchers into thriving biomedical-research careers”, says a spokesperson for the agency’s Office of Extramural Research.
Replenishing the talent pool
The NIH’s request comes as biomedical graduate students increasingly turn to positions in industry, prompting many principal investigators to raise concerns, saying that they are struggling to fill postdoc positions. To find solutions, the agency asked a working group of NIH researchers and external scientists what the agency could do to cultivate postdoctoral talent.
In a report delivered in December, the panel recommended that NIH-funded postdocs receive a minimum salary of US$70,000 with yearly adjustments for inflation. Since then, the agency has raised postdoc salaries modestly and said that it intends postdoc pay to reach the recommended target no later than 2029 if funding allows.
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The panel also recommended a five-year limit for its funding of postdoc positions and changes to a key grant called a K99, which is designed to help postdocs find their footing as they search for faculty positions. At present, researchers can apply for a K99 if they have less than four years of experience as a postdoc; the panel recommended restricting applications to those with less than two years of experience.
Senior postdocs, instead of continuing in that role, should be promoted to an intermediate position sometimes called ‘staff scientist’ or ‘laboratory associate’ that comes with higher pay, says Shelley Berger, an epigeneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who co-chaired the NIH panel. The working group recommended that, within one year of the report’s release, the agency expand support for these intermediate roles.
The panel recommended these changes to encourage researchers to move into more permanent positions rather than remain stuck in postdoc positions with salaries that aren’t commensurate to their skill set, says Donna Ginther, a member of the working group and an economist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who studies the composition of the scientific workforce. “You don’t want people to spend their most productive years in a postdoc,” she says.
But the agency has not yet implemented or sought feedback on the recommendation for extra funding for intermediate roles, Berger says. That lack of action is “very disappointing”, says Berger, adding that it would be logical to roll it out in tandem with the five-year postdoc cap.
Funding inequities
Encouraging senior postdocs to move to positions that provide the pay they deserve is a noble goal, says Tiffany Ho, a clinical neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. But she worries that without extra funding to support such positions, only well-funded labs would be able to attract and retain such individuals as staff scientists. That would perpetuate inequities between the best-funded labs and those with more modest support, she says.
The cap could also prevent researchers from pursuing multiple postdoc positions in different labs, as some choose to do. Cliffe, who studies herpesviruses, says the cap would have stopped her from doing a second postdoc in a neuroscience lab, which was “totally different” from the area she’d trained in. “But it allowed me to be creative, combine my expertise and set up a truly novel research area,” she adds.
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In addition, halving the eligibility window for the K99 would have a chilling effect on international scientists, Ho says, because it is the only NIH funding specifically for postdoc support that is available to those who are not US citizens. “US citizens would be favoured heavily, because they already have the networks and communities to hit the ground running,” she says. This could work against efforts by the NIH to train researchers from backgrounds underrepresented in the biomedical sciences, says Camila Coelho, a vaccinologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “You are feeding a system where you are giving privilege to people that already have privilege,” she says.
The NIH hopes that researchers respond to its request for feedback “so we can hear more about these concerns” and “ensure a sustainable, diverse future workforce”, the agency spokesperson says.
Stagnating budget
These proposals come at a time of tight budgets for the agency: the NIH budget for 2024 remained essentially flat at $47.1 billion, which amounts to a net loss when inflation is taken into account, Berger says, and the 2025 budget is expected to be about the same. The increase in postdoc salaries will probably mean cuts have to be made elsewhere, Ginther says.
Ho says the dire situation for postdocs should prompt a conversation in the scientific community about how it can invest more in “early-stage researchers, even if it would probably come at the cost of supporting researchers like me”. In 2017, a proposal was made, although it wasn’t implemented, that would have restricted the amount of NIH funding awarded to an individual scientist at any given time. “If we, as a community, can decide that’s okay because we’re investing in the future, maybe that’s a workable solution,” Ho says.