A Gift to the Millennium? The NIH Doubling Period and Scientific Advance

• In Event: 067 - Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Science and Governance

Abstract

Between 1998 and 2003, congress doubled the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This growth in federal funding for biomedical research was unprecedented in the modern era and has not seen since; indeed, funding for the NIH has declined in dollar terms since the doubling period ended. The stated goals of the doubling period were to change science in America, revolutionize medicine, and usher in a golden age of discovery by creating new fields of research. I ask whether these goals were achieved. Prior explorations of this topic have focused on whether the doubling period, and federal funding more generally, increased the volume of research conducted in the form of publications and have generally had mixed results. By contrast, I draw on the sociology of science literature and argue that to evaluate whether the doubling’s goals were met, we must examine the structure of scientific knowledge itself. To do this, I use social network methods to test whether the doubling corresponded with relational and compositional changes in the topological and dynamic idea space of biomedical research at the leading edge of scientific production. By analyzing the ideas that were researched in over half a million funded competing NIH proposals from 1985-2008, I show that the NIH doubling did in fact change the structure of science, but not in the most easily measureable ways.

Author

• Ashton M. Verdery, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill