News & Views item - December 2007

 

NIH Peer Review System Under Critical Scrutiny. (December 8, 2007)

Credit: UCSF and ScienceNOW
Cause for celebration?
UCSF's Keith Yamamoto is leading a committee to re-imagine peer review at NIH.

The US National Institutes of Health last examined its system of peer review 8 years ago but not all types of grants were covered.

 

This time  biochemist Keith Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, told ScienceNOW: "Elias [NIH Director Elias Zerhouni] said, 'Look at the whole thing,' ".

 

This past week at a meeting held at NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland the members of the advisory committee to Dr Zerhouni debated everything from doing away with the current scoring system on grant proposals to incentives that might improve the quality and motivation of reviewers.

 

The fact is the peer review at NIH as elsewhere is under increasing strain. For example Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who was not a member of the peer-review team told ScienceNOW: "'we are desperately worried' about new investigators, who find it hard to land grants and may turn away from science."

 

A request from the NIH for submissions from interested parties elicited over 2,600 responses.

 

Some of the suggestions:

ScienceNOW concludes: "For those applying for grants, possibilities being seriously considered include:

Now, say Yamamoto and Tabak,  firm recommendations need to be presented to Dr Zerhouni by February.

 

It might be of interest and even useful for those in the newly elected Australian government who are charged with relegating its predecessor's Research Quality Framework as well as the administrators of the ARC and NHMRC to see just what those 2600 submissions received by the NIH contain.

 


Note added December 17, 2007 -

[Your readers] might be interested that we too ARE looking at this, have just had Toni Scarpa from NIH here (he runs their external review process) and will have the Director of NIH, Dr Elias Zerhouni, here at  NHMRC in January to help further with this task. Like NIH, I think there are ways we can do this better!

Professor Warwick Anderson
Chief Executive Officer
National Health & Medical Research Council