WORCESTER Dr. Michael R. Green's laboratory on the sixth floor of a research building at the University of Massachusetts Medical School feels a little like a maze.
The path between "benches," counters and cabinets that hold the tools of science, winds past vials, analytical machines and sinks. Tucked nearly out of sight are small desks, where some of the approximately 20 employees of Dr. Green's lab huddle over paperwork.
It's a substantial enterprise, all focused on understanding the forces that make genes work, and largely supported by the nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in an amount that Dr. Green declines to specify.
But recently, the lab gained another funding source. The Rett Syndrome Research Trust awarded Dr. Green a $750,000 three-year grant for research that might throw light on Rett Syndrome, a disabling disorder on the autism spectrum that is caused by a gene mutation.
It's not something Dr. Green's lab has traditionally pursued, but as Dr. Green, director of the UMass program on gene function and expression, puts it, "We have a lot of ideas, and research is expensive."
It's an arrangement that bypasses the nation's largest funder of biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health, and for a specific reason. Federal budget cuts are limiting the pot of money available to scientists at UMass and elsewhere.
The NIH awarded $9.8 billion to U.S. researchers in fiscal 2013 under its R01 program, the oldest and largest category of grants for health-related research. That was down nearly 4 percent from levels of $10.2 billion a decade earlier in 2004.
Over the same decade, the number of R01 grants awarded by NIH dropped 16 percent, and the odds for applicants got longer. In 2004, about 25 percent of applications were funded. By 2013, the success rate was down to 17 percent, NIH records show.
Federal funding for biomedical research is dropping as more young scientists are entering the field. National Science Foundation data show 8,440 biomedical doctorates were awarded in 2012, up 48 percent in just one decade.
Not all Ph.D. holders go into academic medicine and basic research, but enough have done so that the field has become an "unsustainable hypercompetitive system that is discouraging even the most outstanding prospective students from entering our profession and making it difficult for seasoned investigators to produce their best work," scientists Bruce Alberts, Marc W. Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman and Harold Varmus wrote in a recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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