Mad Dash for Grants Is About to Begin

There will be agony in some quarters and ecstasy in others over the next few weeks as scientists across the country compete for a handful of extraordinary grants from the National Science Foundation.

The foundation, which is the federal government’s primary funding agency for individual scientists, will soon kill off several research centers and create up to 10 new ones to focus on specific issues over the next decade.

It is all part of a bold experiment launched by the NSF in 1987. At that time, some 25 science and technology centers were established across the country, each with very specific issues to investigate. They were given 11 years to make substantial progress toward their goals with a guaranteed funding rate of about $2 million per year for each center. A typical NSF grant is for only one year, and it usually goes to just one scientist.

For many of those centers--including three in California--the 11 years is nearing an end, and the likelihood of continued funding from the NSF is virtually nil. In a couple of months, the NSF will seek applications for new centers to replace those whose time is up.

The Center for Particle Astrophysics at UC Berkeley; the Center for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate at UC San Diego; and the Center for Quantized Electronic Structures at UC Santa Barbara are all due to be phased out over the next year or so. Two other California programs funded through the foundation--the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC and the Center for Plant Resistances at UC Davis--were formed later and still have several years to go on their contracts.

The older centers will have a chance for continued funding from the NSF only if they can “reinvent themselves,” says Nathaniel Pitts, who heads the program at the NSF.

“In our original concept, these people have 11 years to work on a specific topic, and once they have done that, the NSF will look for other ideas to invest in,” Pitts says.

So despite the fact that the three California centers have advanced the understanding of the major problems they tackled, all are about to be closed.

“The philosophy around here is that we should be looking at different ideas now,” Pitts says.

That search for new ideas is expected to prompt a mad scramble by hundreds of universities and research institutions for the grants. Pitts says he expects up to 500 applications when the program is formally announced around Oct. 1.

“We will lose a lot of friends,” Pitts says, as the number of applicants is reduced through peer review to about 20. From that group, the NSF will pick eight to 10 programs to fund for the next decade.

When the program was first announced in 1987, it was met with some hostility within the scientific community because of fears that the NSF was moving away from funding individual scientists, many of whom have no place else to turn for financial support. But the centers have always been a minor player in the NSF, commanding only about 3% of the agency’s budget. That level is not expected to change.

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The program has won the endorsement of several outside evaluators, including the National Academies of Science and Engineering, which concluded the program had produced “world-class research that would not have been possible without a center structure.”

Marc Davis, director of the UC Berkeley Center for Particle Astrophysics, says his center’s progress in the search for “dark matter” in the universe validated the concept.

“The centers have been very successful, allowing large, collaborative projects,” Davis says. His center, which has one year left on its grant, developed instruments that will allow scientists to intensify their search for matter that cannot be seen but is believed to make up most of the universe.

Pitts says the philosophy of the program remains unchanged. The goal is to bring scientists from various disciplines to work on projects that are too complex to be tackled by single researchers.

“If you pick your topics well, and give top-flight investigators an opportunity to study them seriously, unencumbered by issues of time, and to some degree money, then they can make a lot of progress,” he says.

Although he says the NSF is open to any ideas, applicants in some areas are more likely to be successful in getting funding than others. The hot-button issues include global climate change, computational science, biotechnology and education.

He lays out a simple formula for success:

* The winning applicants will have a high probability of making significant progress toward answering key scientific questions.

“[Their findings] will change the entire way that the research community or the industrial community or anybody else looks at this issue again,” he says.

* The scientists involved in the program must be outstanding in their fields and adept at working in a team environment.

* The center should involve some other element of the community, either industry, government or education.

That latter qualification should help the center survive even after the NSF terminates funding. Pitts says some centers, particularly in the computer sciences, will pick up other funding so easily that “we won’t even be missed.”

But others, especially in the more arcane fields of science, such as astrophysics, may have little chance of getting other funding.

For them, it will be goodbye. But others, seeking answers to questions we may not have even heard of, will land one of the best plums in science.

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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at leedye@compuserve.com