Neuropsychologist Kate Hoy says its not good enough to be excellent any more when it comes to competing for science funding. Photo: Wayne Taylor
It’s not the voices or the paranoia that makes schizophrenia so disabling.
It’s the effect of the disease on attention and memory that patients report to be most debilitating.
“That really impacts on their ability to live day to day and there’s no effective treatment for those symptoms,” neuropsychologist Dr Kate Hoy says.
But a discovery by Hoy could change all that. Over the past two years she has observed that gentle brain stimulation with weak electric currents can improve the mental capacity of people with schizophrenia after just one session.
The results amazed the 33-year-old, a researcher at the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne, so she applied for funding to run a larger clinical trial to confirm the preliminary results.
Next month Hoy will learn if she has won a ticket in the lottery that has become Australia’s research funding schemes. But she has nagging doubts about whether she will succeed.
“I’m fairly likely to be in a position at the end of this year of not having funding for my salary or funding to conduct my research,” Hoy says.
The problem isn’t Hoy, or her research, which has been judged world-class by her peers.
The problem is that as universities continue churning out young researchers they have to compete for a stagnating pool of public research funds, which took a cut for the first time in a decade in Tony Abbott’s first budget.
“It’s just not good enough to be excellent any more,” she says.
Just one in eight research projects is expected to receive money from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the government’s medical research funding body, when the next round is announced next month.
The Australian Research Council, which awards research grants in other fields, had only enough money to fund one in five ideas last year.
For researchers such as Hoy, who are within the first five to 10 years of their career, the odds are even worse.
“It’s a really difficult position to be in,” she says.
Funding bodies chose projects based on several criteria, including the quality of the idea and its potential impact. But a significant weight is given to a researcher’s past achievements, such as their published papers.
Because of this emphasis on a scientist’s track record, the system disproportionately favours older, more established investigators over younger ones, whose ideas are just as good, but who have less to show for it.
Hoy knows countless others in her position and says Australia is in danger of losing many early and mid-career researchers.
“It’s a real looming problem for Australian research.”
The science community has loudly opposed cuts to research funding, but has remained rather quiet about this much more entrenched problem, which promises far longer-term consequences than this year’s budget cut.
While early career researchers make up about 20 per cent of Australia’s research workforce, estimates suggest they and PhD students produce about 60 per cent of the country’s research output.
“When the current professors start to retire in 10 to 20 years, possibly earlier, if this isn’t addressed, there’s going to be no one to come up through the ranks,” Hoy says.
Australian IVF pioneer Alan Trounson calls this a “catastrophe”, one that will have significant impacts on the country’s future.
Without a strong research workforce Australia will struggle to transition from an economy based on mineral resources to one driven by innovative new industries and advanced manufacturing.
These are the people who will win our future Nobel prizes, develop medical treatments and society changing inventions, Trounson says.
Medical researcher Martin Rees has a novel idea about how certain proteins damage artery walls, leading to heart disease.
“If my idea is right it will change the way we treat that damage,” he says.
The research could be game-changing. Rees and his team have even discovered a class of compounds that can prevent this damage, which, with further study, could lead to a treatment for a disease that affects millions of people worldwide.
But since Rees’ contract at the University of NSW ran out mid-year, the future of this research, and his career as a scientist, is in doubt.
Because most young researchers are employed at institutions on temporary contracts, they rely on grants – either their own or those awarded to lab directors or collaborators – to pay their salaries.
To stay in the lab for a few more months Rees cobbled together some money via crowd funding, but if he misses out on grant funding in the next two months he will likely leave research by the end of the year.
“It would be a massive blow to that research if I go,” he says.
The looming exodus of young researchers won’t just place the nation’s future science workforce at risk; it threatens to starve the country of life-changing discoveries and great ideas, such as Rees’ project.
“You’re most likely to make a discovery or an advance when you’re young,” Nobel-prize winning immunologist Professor Peter Doherty says. “You’re more flexible in your thinking.”
It has been well documented that scientists are at their most productive early in their career.
Indeed, the majority of Nobel prize winners in science were under 40 when they made their world-changing discoveries.
Doherty was 33, and his collaborator, Rolf Zinkernagel, a few years younger, when they uncovered the specific mechanisms immune cells use to protect the body against viruses.
“By the time scientists are 40 or so they are getting reasonable success and so they’re not in the lab. But the further you get away from the primary data the less likely you are to make a real discovery,” Doherty says.
Over the past three decades, the average age of a lead investigator on an NHMRC grant has increased by nine years to 48.
Experienced scientists still have great ideas, make remarkable discoveries and are invaluable teachers, oceanographer Ben McNeil says.
But because funding is tight they know that risky, creative ideas are less likely to gain funding and so they pitch ones that are safe, sure bets. These ideas are backed by reams of data and preliminary studies, he says.
McNeil, who founded a website for the public to sponsor research ideas, worries that this huge shift towards conservatism and safety has created a creativity deficit in science.
It’s often the craziest, most innovative ideas that lead to truly revolutionary breakthroughs, he says.
“There’s no lack of brilliant, passionate creative researchers; the current peer-review system just doesn’t seem to fund enough of them,” he says.
Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt needed time and a stable work environment to make his discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.
To even the playing field for young researchers, funding bodies consider a scientist’s performance relative to their opportunities. Both the NHMRC and ARC also have specific funding schemes for young researchers. But the 600 or so grants provide for only a fraction of the country’s 20,000 early and mid-career researchers.
Schmidt and Doherty say a greater proportion of public money should be directed to young, bright scientists.
“Old guys need to get out of the way,” Doherty says. “I’ve been killing myself off for some years now.”
If the career prospects in research were more stable, Tim Nielson suspects he would still be peering down a microscope in a lab somewhere.
But when the biochemist was still employed on one-year-contracts in his mid-30s, he decided he had to head for better job security in industry.
“I have a family, I have financial responsibilities,” he says.
Nielson now works for a company that manufactures testing kits and treatments for sleep apnoea, and loves it.
He says more PhD students should consider a future career in industry rather than academia, a sentiment echoed by many people including the country’s Chief Scientist, Ian Chubb.
More young researchers in industry would boost the collaboration between business and science – Australia has the worst rate in the developed world – and reduce the oversupply of students.
Sharath Sriram, the acting chairman of the Early and Mid-Career Research Forum, says government, universities and industry need to create more pathways for young researchers to enter industry.
“In the US all big consultancy firms are always after PhDs because they know how to look at a problem and find ways to solve it,” he says.
In Australia, surveys conducted by the chief scientist’s office found industry felt PhD graduates were overqualified, asked too many questions and were tough to manage, Sriram says.
“They probably asked the hard questions to make the place better,” he says.
In Norway 14 out of every 1000 industry workers have a PhD, in Australia it is only three in 1000.
Hoy says universities need to offer broader training as part of a PhD so graduates are attractive to industry, policy and education.
The University of Queensland has introduced The Agents of Change PhD program, which funds doctoral students to research food security and will lead them to jobs in business. And Monash University has established the Monash PhD that prepares students for work beyond their degree.
In the past six months, Hoy has come to terms with the idea she may have to leave research for something more secure, possibly a position in science communication or management.
“I love this job so that’s really scary,” she says.