Research gets boost from stimulus money
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By Peter Hirschfeld Vermont Press Bureau - Published: September 27, 2009
Dr. David Krag, a Fletcher Allen surgeon and full-time professor at the University of Vermont, is quite literally on the cutting edge of breast-cancer treatment.
His "sentinel node" technique – whereby "radioactive tracers" are used to remove bits of lymph nodes underneath the armpits – has, to the great benefit of cancer patients, lessened the invasiveness of a procedure that formerly required more profound surgical intervention.
Funded by an ongoing research grant from the National Institutes of Health, Krag has in recent years been tracking the success of his procedure through a university-based clinical trial involving more than 5,000 patients.
"The research was to do a large randomized trial comparing this sentinel node procedure versus the complete lymph-node removal, which is called axillary dissection," Krag explains.
His work seemed poised for an abrupt end, however, when the NIH denied Krag's latest request for funding.
"It's the largest surgical trial in breast cancer that has ever been done in world and we were getting ready to shut it down," he said.
Then "out of the blue," Krag says, he learned earlier this year that his research would be funded after all. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, provisions of which had bolstered NIH's research budget by some $9 billion, rescued a scientific pursuit that would otherwise have fallen victim to depleted funding.
While the impact of stimulus money in Vermont is perhaps most evident in road, bridge and other more visible capital projects, the recovery act has also infused the state's academic world with newfound resources for scientific endeavors.
All told, more than $16 million has flowed into the state via grants from the NIH, National Science Foundation and National Health Service. From genetic analyses of harvester ants to studies on "supernova ejecta" and the "interstellar medium," Vermont professors, and the colleges and universities that employ them, have found a financial oasis.
"It was like somebody turned the pipe on and it just gushed out," says Rich Dunfee, director of the Grants Resource Center at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. "It really was a shock to the system in terms of research and development projects."
The recovery act poured some $9 billion into the National Institutes of Health's "extramural" research budget, the vast majority of which is distributed in the form of grants to professors and universities. The National Science Foundation saw its grant-funding capacity rise by 50 percent when the stimulus money bolstered its research budget by $3 billion.
At the University of Vermont, the stimulus has provided more than $14 million in funding for 41 research grants. Middlebury will see $1.2 million for seven projects; Bennington College won a $237,000 grant for a single study.
For Sara Cahan, an assistant professor at UVM who won a $800,000 NSF grant to study "genetic architecture and evolution of reproductive caste determination in harvester ants," the stimulus is a welcome boost to her pursuits.
"In a word, it's really fantastic," Cahan says. "This is now the third time I've submitted this grant, so I was getting a little worried I wasn't going to be able to do it. But now I have funding for four years."
Cahan's study essentially aims to determine whether an ant's genetic traits determine if it will grow into a queen or a worker. With a staff of Vermont researchers, whose salaries will be paid for with stimulus money, Cahan hopes to develop a genetic model that will inform understanding not only of harvester ants, but perhaps humans as well.
"The basic processes of life are shared across all organisms," Cahan says. "So if you want to understand the basics about how we develop, how our bodies develop, you don't have to look at humans to do that."
For colleges suffering under the economic pressures of a severe funding crunch, the infusion of recovery dollars comes at a helpful time. Not only does the money offer "life-changing" academic experiences for graduate and under-graduate students, university officials say, the money also supplements professors' salaries and can provide employment for otherwise out-of-work research assistants – many of them students. In addition, up to one-third of research grants go directly to university overhead, an important revenue source in a particularly harsh financial climate.
"We're very pleased that at a time of budget cutbacks, the money available through the federal stimulus package allows several faculty members to continue their important work," says Alison Byerly, a provost and executive vice president at Middlebury College, who also works as a professor of English.
Byerly says research budgets at Middlebury are probably at their highest levels in a decade thanks to the stimulus infusion. As an undergraduate institution, Byerly says, the non-profit's first priority isn't always directed toward research projects.
"As important as research is at Middlebury, obviously we have to look first at our undergraduate programs and teaching programs," Byerly says. "Support for research is a hard thing to maintain in a difficult fiscal environment. To have so many faculty well-supported by government funds means that instead of seeing a lot of this research grind to a halt and students be unable to carry forward their work in labs, it allows important projects to continue."
Frank Winkler, a 40-year professor at Middlebury, will use his $300,000 grant from the NSF to study "supernova ejecta, shocks, and the interstellar medium." Phrased in layman's terms, Winkler says, he basically wants to see "how stars blow up at the end of their lives and seed the universe with heavy elements."
For Winkler and other professors, the stimulus money has amounted to a Renaissance for scientific pursuits.
"This is not science that's going to cure cancer," he says of his own project. "But it is science that addresses a pretty fundamental question, and that is – 'Where do we come from?'"
Some professors concede that the arcane nature of their endeavors, and the amount of money they're receiving to study them, could be easy fodder for opponents of the stimulus plan. Spending $392,000 to let a UVM professor study "mechanistic investigations of secondary organic aerosol growth" might not have any apparent benefits to the taxpayers funding the grant.
But Cahan and others say the experiments being conducted at UVM and Middlebury will change human understanding of the world in a way that's bound to – somehow and someday – benefit those who inhabit it.
"In order to know something about the world, you have to invest in that knowledge process," Cahan says. "And if we want to train the next generation of people who are going to solve our problems, then we need to involve them in research projects."
For professors and faculty, a lingering concern now is what happens when the stimulus spigot shuts off, and scientists are again left to compete for a dwindling pool of grant resources.
"Of course it's a concern" Dunfee says. "I hope it can be sustained. I hope we'll not see a pullback in the commitment to these kinds of things. But given the economic environment, it's a concern."
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