Research Informatics.org

Unless you have been living in a remote corner of the world for the last several months, you are probably well aware of the current infusion of ARRA (http://www.recovery.gov/) related funds into the national scientific and biomedical research enterprises. In the realm of NIH extramural research, this infusion accounts for 8.2 Billion in additional funds (http://grants.nih.gov/recovery/), divided among the constituent IC’s (institutions and centers) of the institute. Clearly, this is a major catalyst for the national health and life sciences enterprise that has been sorely needed for a number of years (for more details on this issue, take a look at some of my previous postings regarding the grave funding situation facing our community over the past several years). However, the funds are not without strings, which include short time frames in which they must be expended (on the order of 24 months), and stringent reporting requirements. In many ways, the rush by our community to secure such funds for our favored or highest priority projects is reminiscent of the gold rush of 1849 in California, in which a social-epidemic swept the nation, leading to a mass migration and tectonic shift in activities towards a new source of revenue and wealth. Yet, if we open our history textbooks, we also know that by 1859, a short ten years after the discovery of gold in California (especially given the speed of commerce, travel, and communications in the late 1800’s), the combined discovery of silver in Nevada and an ongoing evolution in U.S. monetary policy ended the gold rush. Such a history lesson begs a number of questions, namely:

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Is a massive infusion of resources into the current biomedical research enterprise, without a broader view towards the evolution of the sector, its practioners, and processes, likely to yield a sustainable model of growth, or set our community up for an even more traumatic evolution in funding and practice in a relatively short time frame (on the order of 24-36 months)?

Will there be a major shift in policy and corresponding social epidemic that will quickly mitigate the cultural, structural, and operational changes we are working so hard to achieve under the current ARRA model, again in a relatively short time frame?

How do we, as a community of researchers, scientists, and practioners, make the optimal use of current ARRA funds and systematic changes being effected by those funds, while balancing our “portfolio� of expertise and initiatives to ensure the continued growth and evolution of our field, especially in light of likely future tectonic shifts in funding and policies?

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Beyond the preceding questions, there also remains a set of what I would consider similarly compelling question concerning the relationships (or perhaps more conspicuously, lack of systematic relationships) between NIH stimulus related programs and the highly complimentary HITECH act passed as part of the overall stimulus package (http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s350/show), especially in the context of the informatics community – a topic that appears worthy of a future posting to this blog!

Weigh in and share your opinion on the questions above, or others that you would like to raise!

[Don’t know what a Forty-Niner is (other than a football team)?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush]