MEASURING EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH AND RESEARCH TRAINING
Canberra, 22 June 2004

Excellence in investigator-driven research
Professor Robert Graham

All I can say after Robin Batterham’s talk is, ‘Oh dear! There are lots of things I disagree with in what he said.’ But anyway we will have to battle on, as you will see in my presentation.

What I chose to do today, rather than getting into specifics and examples of how you measure excellence, or what is excellence, is to explore more the notions of quality, the concepts of what constitutes excellence, and present some principles.

To begin with, let me tell you what I think investigator-driven research is, why I think it is very important and why I think we should resist what Robin is suggesting we do with the new way of funding, which I hope will become apparent. What I would like to do is to explore just four issues: what is investigator-driven research, what is excellence in investigator-driven research, how can we foster excellence in investigator-driven research, and how can we better capture the value of research?

So let me start with the first: what is investigator-driven research? Inherent in the concept of investigator-driven research is that it is a system of research funding, largely pioneered in the United States and adopted in Australia and a few European countries. It is a system not practised in Eastern Bloc countries, Japan or many European countries. In those countries the direction and the control of research are vested in a relatively few senior people, and agendas are determined in a top-down fashion.

In the US, the bulk of research funding goes to individual investigators, thus making them unbeholden to department heads, to deans or to university politics. After applying for a grant, the individual is judged in competition with other applicants by a group of peers outside of their institution, and with the awarding of a grant the investigator becomes his or her own boss, whose success or failure depends entirely on what they can accomplish.

So investigator research is curiosity-driven inquiry initiated by an individual. With respect to biomedical research, it need not be commercial or applied research, not health-outcomes research nor clinical trials research, although it can be. But it can as well just be pure basic research.

I would suggest that, much like a democracy, it is a system that has to be constantly defended but one that we are prepared to fight for – indeed, we are prepared to die for it in some instances – because we can see its profound value.

So too investigator research is not without its problems. It is a system that engenders conflict: the conflicts of freedom versus responsibility, discovery versus utility, what we are able to do versus where we need to go, strategic initiatives versus unencumbered directions, and societal responsibility versus intellectual curiosity.

And because of these conflicts, investigator-driven research, or funding for individual investigators, is continuously under threat. As Robin told you before, there is a move away from this sort of individual research into group and collective research. And, I would suggest, that is a bad thing.

For example, although Japan is to be applauded for instigating the Human Frontier Science Program, such grants are made only to groups from several countries who can devise a project advanced enough to be divided among them. The bulk of the research funding in Japan is not investigator-driven.

In Europe, the EU requires that investigators from three or more countries find a consensus project that can be parcelled up, leaving little room for a scientist to do something utterly original and entirely unpopular.

In the UK, despite what Robin says, I would suggest that in biomedical research, at least, their research has improved because of the great injection of funds by the Wellcome Trust, which was desperately needed after the Thatcher era otherwise it might have fallen completely apart, rather than because of any measures of excellence. Indeed, the Medical Research Council is increasingly consolidating grants along the lines of the EU.

In Italy, the powerful baronial organisation of research granting agencies perpetuates fragmentation and favouritism.

What about in Australia? While the abolition of block grant funding I think is to be applauded, a considerable fraction of the NHMRC budget is already obligated to program grants, in some of which directors can select investigators and projects that might not otherwise withstand peer review. Although most of these projects serve legitimate purposes, the outlay to support them becomes a fixed-entitlement expenditure.

Of greater concern to me personally is the move to direct up to one-third of the ARC budget to ‘strategic initiatives’, an issue that I tackled Vicki Sara on in this very room over a year ago. In fairness, Vicki then explained to me that that was not her idea but an initiative that came from above.

Although the recent NHMRC review, the so-called Wills report, resulted in a much-needed increase in research funding, and for that it should be applauded, I would suggest that it was predicated largely on a business platform, with heavy emphasis on research commercialisation but with little recognition or understanding of the intrinsic value, let alone the riches, of discovery – probably reflecting in part that the head of this review was a business person rather than a scientist.

How do we resolve these conflicts? Here I can offer but three principles. Like democracy, and despite its problems, investigator-driven research has served us well. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We need to defend it, and we need to uphold its value.

Secondly, I would like to suggest that scientists, let alone governments, are very bad at looking into the crystal ball and trying to determine directions and where we should be going. Strategic paths, therefore, should provide a compass, not control the journey.

And, thirdly, I think we need to get the balance right. For example, in the United States and other countries that have successful investigator-driven research programs, only 10 to 15 per cent of the total research funding is devoted to programmatic or strategic research.

I would like to digress here a moment and read you an editorial by Arthur Kornberg, Nobel Laureate for discovering DNA polymerase, and published in Science, 12 December 1997. He said:

An oft-stated reason for block grants and collective efforts is the expensive equipment and resources needed to solve the problems of major diseases. A common illusion is that ‘strategic’ objectives are necessary to discover the cures for cancer and AIDS, and that groups of sufficient size need to be mobilised for wars and crusades against the enemies.

Nothing could be more misguided. In the history of triumphs in biomedical science, such wars and crusades have invariably failed because they lacked the necessary weapons: the essential knowledge of basic life processes.

Instead, some of the major advances – X-rays, penicillin, polio vaccine and genetic engineering – have come from the efforts of individual scientists to understand Nature, unrelated to any practical objective. Basic research has been the province of the individual investigator and remains the lifeline of me