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FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SOCIETIES FOR EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY Moreover, during this same period the number of research project grants funded by NIH grew from 23,177 in 1990 to a projected 32,942 in 2000 (42 percent), while the research project grant budget increased from $4,640 million to $7,103 million in 1990 dollars (53.1 percent). 1 THE ORIGIN OF THE STUDY Over the past several years, the leadership of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and its member societies have been hearing reports of unmet instrumentation needs. These concerns have been raised in society council meetings, in letters from concerned scientists and at consensus conferences. The shared instrumentation issue has been reviewed in nearly every FASEB Federal Funding Consensus Conference from 1993–1999. In the face of these persistent but informal indicators of a more general problem, the Instrumentation and Infrastructure Subcommittee of the Science Policy Committee (David Lester, PhD; Mustafa Lokhandwala, PhD; Fred Naider, PhD; Stephen White, PhD; and David Speicher, PhD, chair) decided to conduct a detailed investigation into this issue. Representatives of the committee met with Judy Vaitukaitis, MD, Director of the NCRR, who provided an overview of NCRR initiatives and data on the Center’s programs. The committee also collected available information on instrumentation assessments conducted by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and co-sponsored by the NIH. 2 After reviewing the existing data, the committee concluded that there was a shortage of current information on investigators’ instrumentation needs. The last NSF/NIH instrumentation survey, published in 1994, was based on the views of institutional administrators and did not necessarily reflect the views of individual practicing scientists. Another instrumentation study, an NCCR-contracted overview of the SIG program, was conducted using data from 1993. 3 Due to the relative paucity of current data, the committee decided to take a more systematic look at the way in which current programs were meeting researchers’ needs for advanced equipment. To derive an objective standard of “need,” the committee chose to focus on a major group of scientists whose work had already been deemed meritorious: recipients of NIH R01 awards. A series of questions was developed to determine the researchers’ views about the importance of instrumentation, current funding arrangements, access to equipment, and adequacy of funding for instrumentation and priorities for future federal funding. 168 JOURNAL OF BIOMOLECULAR TECHNIQUES, VOLUME 11, ISSUE 4, DECEMBER 2000 This report contains the results of the survey of R01 funded investigators. Under the direction of David W. Speicher, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, PA, and with the collaboration of Tamara R. Zemlo and Howard H. Garrison of the FASEB Office of Public Affairs, the Instrumentation and Infrastructure Subcommittee developed the survey report. The FASEB Science Policy Committee reviewed the final report. On June 6th the FASEB Public Affairs Executive Committee on behalf of the FASEB Board of Directors accepted it. SURVEY METHODS FASEB obtained a file listing the names and addresses of all FY 1998 recipients of research project grants from NIH. 4 From this file containing the records for 21,145 R01s awarded to 14,745 investigators, a random sample of 1,000 principal investigators was selected. In November of 1999, each member of the sample was sent a short letter announcing the study. 5 Two weeks later the NIH-funded investigators received a copy of the survey questionnaire asking them for their views on the adequacy of federal support for instrumentation, the availability of shared resources, and their recommendations regarding federal funding priorities for equipment. Completed surveys were returned by 508 scientists, 51 percent of the sample when the survey closed in February of 2000. Some members of the sample (e.g., behavioral scientists, epidemiologists, and some clinical researchers) may have not returned questionnaires because their research did not make extensive use of instrumentation. To address the possibility of selection bias in survey responses, characteristics of the survey respondents were compared to those of the entire grantee population and/or the survey nonrespondents on three dimensions: experience as head of a laboratory, institutional affiliation and laboratory budgets. On all three measures, no evidence of selection bias was found. 6 RESULTS Importance of Shared Equipment Most of the survey respondents (61 percent) strongly agreed with the statement “shared equipment and core facilities at my institution are extremely important for my research” (Fig. 1). Another 23 percent agreed with this statement for a combined total of nearly 84 percent. This overwhelming appreciation of the importance of shared equipment is very notable and
provides a striking endorsement of the role of advanced instrumentation in NIH-funded research. Access to Equipment While NIH-funded investigators reported that shared equipment was very important to their research programs, large numbers encountered difficulties obtaining access to such instrumentation. Only one half of the survey respondents felt that their institutions adequately supported shared research resources such as common use equipment and specialized core facilities (12 percent strongly agreed and 38 percent agreed) FIGURE 2 My institution adequately supports shared research resources. FIGURE 1 INSTRUMENTATION NEEDS Shared equipment and core facilities are essential to my research. (Fig. 2). One third of the respondents indicated that their institutions have not adequately supported shared research resources (12 percent strongly disagreed and 21 percent disagreed with the survey question). A large fraction of the researchers polled (48 percent) felt that their institutions were not able to implement new shared research technologies and required associate equipment in a timely manner (13 percent strongly disagreed and 35 percent disagreed) (Fig. 3). Only 5 percent of the respondents strongly agreed and 24 percent agreed with a statement indicating that their institutions were able to adopt new technologies in a timely fashion. JOURNAL OF BIOMOLECULAR TECHNIQUES, VOLUME 11, ISSUE 4, DECEMBER 2000 169
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P133-S Application of human cDNA mi
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