One of the world’s largest funders of biomedical research is looking to spread the wealth around a little more evenly.
The nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will bar institutions that already have two or more beneficiaries of its Investigator Program from applying for a round of funds to be awarded in 2027. The goal is to “broaden institutional representation by encouraging applications from scientists in geographic regions where HHMI is not currently supporting scientists,” an HHMI spokesperson told STAT. The nonprofit plans to reopen eligibility to all institutions in the following round, although planning for that has not yet begun.
Right now, just 10 institutions, led by Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and The Rockefeller University, employ more than half of the HHMI’s principal investigators. The program provides individual investigators with $11 million each over the course of seven years, which can be renewed.
The change, first reported by The Transmitter, was met with praise by some researchers who see a chance to help democratize the program.
“There’s a point of diminishing returns by investing money in the same place,” said Mark Peifer, a developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has criticized the concentration of HHMI investigators at a handful of institutions and called for diversifying the National Institutes of Health’s research portfolio. “HHMI, I think, is recognizing that their impact might be bigger — both in terms of scientific output, but also in terms of human development — to invest a little bit more broadly, and maybe invest in people who aren’t in a place that has phenomenal resources.”
Others suggested that the change could come at a cost to talented scientists who happen to be at institutions with more than two investigators.
“They are an elite funding institution, they focus on the elite, and they give them lots of resources to pursue their research free of the usual bureaucratic constraints, which I think is completely awesome,” said Pierre Azoulay, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied various research funders.
Because HHMI is focused on supporting an elite group of scientists, he added, “the fact that more people stem from Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton than other universities of lower status is not per se evidence that anything has gone wrong.”
Funding frontrunners
The funds and prestige associated with being an HHMI investigator can be transformational for scientists. An HHMI investigator can also elevate the clout of an entire department, Peifer noted, and serve as a source of inspiration for colleagues and students — an effect he has seen first-hand being in the same department as one HHMI investigator at UNC-Chapel Hill.
HHMI investigators are heavily concentrated in Massachusetts, California, and New York. Of the top ten institutions with HHMI investigators, three are in California and four are in Boston. Some argue that the dominance of elite universities can hamper scientific progress because more researchers could potentially make discoveries if they had access to the program’s funding and infrastructure.
“Talent is everywhere, but opportunities are not,” said Prakash Nagarkatti, a professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied geographic inequity in funding by the National Institutes of Health after he saw how difficult it was for his colleagues in South Carolina to secure research funding.
A number of studies have pointed to ways that funding for research can be biased by factors including institution affiliation, gender and race. Other funding bodies are also trying to reckon with inequities in where research dollars go. The National Science Foundation and the NIH both have programs aimed at increasing the geographic diversity of awardees.
Critics of the current status quo in research funding say that a lack of geographic diversity leads some areas to miss out on money that could stimulate local economies and accelerates brain drain as science students in those areas are forced to either move or be left out of the research ecosystem.
“Folks might say, ‘This is not a meritorious way of distributing funding.’ What I would say to that is that the system that we currently have now is not meritorious in the way that we distribute funding in the first place,” says Christine Yifeng Chen, a geochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who has studied racial bias in NSF funding. “What the HHMI policy is trying to do is to counteract these trends such that we can have a body of knowledge that more closely reflects the spectrum of topics that are relevant to all of society, rather than just a select few.”
Science and the ‘Matthew effect’
Research suggests that the fact that HHMI investigators have mostly been at prestigious institutions is both a symptom and an accelerator of institutional inequities in science. While researchers at prestigious universities tend to dominate their field, one study points to increased productivity at elite institutions being the result of having more Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers, as opposed to a PI’s talent.
The topics that are studied at elite institutions are generally perceived to be more prestigious than those studied at mission-driven institutions like historically Black colleges and universities. Being at elite institutions also offers access to elite professional networks of people who serve on panels to review papers, dole out funding, or nominate people for awards. In the most recent class of HHMI investigators, 19 trained in the lab of another HHMI investigator.
In aggregate, this adds up to what is known as the Matthew effect, in which an early advantage in a person’s career tends to snowball over time. “It’s growth that is divorced from actual differences in quality,” said Mathjis de Vaan, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley who has studied the Matthew effect in science. “The idea here being that you get more resources, not necessarily because you’re better, but because previously, people thought you were deserving of more resources so there’s a compounding effect.”
In his study, de Vaan found that applicants just above the cutoff for an early career grant got twice as much funding in the eight years after the grant than those just below the cutoff. He notes that when there is more uncertainty in judging a person or work’s quality, the Matthew effect can be even stronger.
This may apply in the case of HHMI’s funding, which is intended to fund “bold” ideas that may be difficult to judge. “When there’s a lot of uncertainty about the underlying quality of the science, we start to rely on status markers,” he said.
Some funders have experimented with measures to battle the Matthew effect. The Volkswagen Foundation has experimented with funding a certain number of projects by lottery, for example.
The NIH proposed in 2017 to cap the number of grants an individual researcher can have. The measure was intended to provide more openings to younger researchers and those at less elite institutions. But it faced backlash from researchers who would be hurt by the cap on grants — and ultimately the NIH axed the initiative.
“They capitulated to the New England biomedical elite,” Chen said of the NIH. “I’m hoping that the HHMI will be able to weather the storm, so to speak.”