Date: 2007-05-01
How to Boost Agricultural ResearchUS land-grant universities need a radical rethink of their priorities.
The United States is at a crossroads in agricultural research. For 120 years, our land-grant universities and their associated agricultural experiment stations and extension services have succeeded because their collective mission links research, teaching, and outreach. There are cracks in the foundation, however: In 1993, a former land-grant university dean, Harry Kunkel, suggested that knowledge gathered through scholarship was being integrated inadequately. Despite advances in genomics that could be used to identify genetic markers for desired production traits, as well as resistance of plants and animals to parasites, disease, and harsh environments, these failures are even truer today. Most federal funds to land-grant universities are now used to pay faculty and staff salaries, with little left to support operations and even less to support in-depth hypothesis-driven research. In addition, the culture of providing hard-money support has generated scientists in agricultural experiment stations who have no experience with competitive grants programs, and their areas of research and expertise may not allow them to be successful in obtaining funds from competitive grants programs. A look at funding priorities suggests why. Just $177 million was allocated to state land-grant universities for fiscal year 2006. Despite the high value of animal agriculture to the US economy ? $110 billion ? only $36 million of USDA?s $106 billion annual budget was allocated to the USDA?s National Research Initiative (NRI) for competitive research grants. Compare that to the $22.4 billion that the NIH allocated to extramural competitive grants programs. Fortunately, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) plan to reintroduce an act that would create the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Act (NIFA), modeled after the NIH. NIFA would manage up to $1 billion in peer-reviewed grants focused on basic food and agricultural science. This is a good start. The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges? members, who are the primary recipients of USDA extramural grants, however, have a more ambitious proposal to establish CREATE-21 (?Creating Research, Extension, and Teaching Excellence for the 21st Century?) that would establish NIFA as well as consolidate all USDA intramural and extramural research within it. Importantly, CREATE-21 would focus $2.1 billion annually on peer-reviewed extramural research grants and $2.9 billion to the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), other USDA intramural research units, and external funding to land-grant and related academic institutions. Senator Harkin, as well as the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, have expressed concerns over CREATE-21?s combination of intramural and extramural research into one agency. Harkin has said that doing so would mix two different missions. One goal is to ensure that the new entity establish its own culture, independent of USDA?s intramural and extramural programs. Harkin and William H. Danforth, chancellor emeritus of Washington University in St. Louis, and chair of a USDA task force that recommended the institute?s creation, agree that the new program should be isolated administratively ?to shield it from the vagaries of the budget and Federal bureaucracy.? My own feeling is that NIFA is a better option, because CREATE-21 has the potential to become too cumbersome. Whatever form they eventually take, NIFA and CREATE-21 can help end the long-standing cultural view that biomedical research is inappropriate to the land-grant mission, an unfortunate attitude shared by many administrators and influential faculty members at land-grant universities. This cultural barrier has caused many agricultural colleges to segregate themselves intellectually and programmatically from colleges of human medicine, veterinary medicine, and basic life sciences. The isolation of animal science programs, for example, has contributed to lack of recruitment of top researchers and teachers who are competitive for funding available for research on agriculturally important animal species. To succeed, agricultural programs in land-grant universities must provide mechanisms to encourage scientists to think ?integration of scholarship? all the time. Fuller W. Bazer is associate vice president for research and holds the O.D. Butler Chair in Animal Science at Texas A&M University. Advertisement
Rate this article
First authorship vs. Last by Eric J. Murphy [Comment posted 2007-05-21 22:28:12] In response to our colleague, my point is that an ARS scientist who directs projects is under pressure to take the first author position. Other colleagues at other ARS facilities have confirmed that this issue is important for evaluation purposes. My point is simply that if ARS woud move more towards the NIH model, it would ultimately push research forward in a very meaningful way. Having been involved with both agencies, it seems to me that the NIH perspective is more in line with science today, where the senior author (deemed at the individual who will take the heat if something is incorrect or if the ethics are improper), is the last author. This frees up the first authorship for the person who wrote the paper and more than likely did the bulk of the science under the mentorship of the last author (senior author).
The first author is often the person looking to take the next career step, so it is vital that their efforts are recognized. Having sat on a number of search committees, the first author and last author papers recieve the most attention from the committee, however it is most common for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to be in that first author position. Career development is a key point of mentoring and crucial for the development of the next generation of scientist. Agricultural Research at cross roads by C. Devakumar [Comment posted 2007-05-17 12:25:32] I am from India. What a coincidence? There is this Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (LINK same problems haunt both the nations. The "first or senior author" issue is also a part of Indian ARS as well. It is strange that two largest democracies share the same set of problems and this Initiative would be more for sharing common problems rather than knowledge, it appears from this article along with the comments posted so far.
C. Devakumar Do ARS Scientists need to be first authors? by Frances Dupont [Comment posted 2007-05-17 00:30:38] Do ARS Scientists need to be first authors, and is this micromanagement good for agricultural research?
Here is the exact wording from the yearly performance standards for an ARS scientist. This is often interpreted as requiring first authorship although exceptions are made. ELEMENT 2: REPORTS RESEARCH RESULTS The minimum requirement for reporting research results can be met by one of the following: A. One manuscript as principal or senior author and one co-authored manuscript for submittal to a peer-reviewed (refereed) scientific publication is entered into ARIS via form ARS-115 and approved. For purposes of the annual performance evaluation, two manuscripts as co-author can be substituted for a senior/principal author manuscript. Senior author status can be achieved for manuscripts in which other authors have conducted research under the primary direction of the employee and within the scope of the employeeￂﾒs assigned personal research program. B.Patent applications, germplasm releases, or release/publication of models may substitute for manuscripts. Any one of these research accomplishments in which the scientist provided a lead role analogous to principal or senior author would be equivalent to a senior author manuscript. Accomplishments in which the scientist played a co-development role may be substituted for a co-authored manuscript. Murphy is mistaken. by Jerome A. Klun [Comment posted 2007-05-16 19:22:50] Muphy's statement that,"First author papers are more highly valued by ARS than last author papers by their scientists", is flat wrong.
Scientists within ARS are judged on a cyclical basis to ensure accuracy of every scientistￂﾒs classification. This is done through a peer-review based ARS RESEARCH POSITION AND EVALUATION SYSTEM. No where in the system's evaluation guidelines is it stated that first authorship on a paper is any more meritorious than a last authorship listing. What is judged in this system is the impact of a scientist's contributions, and not the position of his or her name in an authorship listing. It would seem that ARS is not as archaic and out of step as Murphy would like to have you believe, and his guidance on how to boost Agricultural Research is not particularly robust. Is the problem the USDA? by Eric Murphy [Comment posted 2007-05-01 20:40:33] I found Dr. Bazer's point well taken, but suggest it is an overall USDA and certainly an ARS problem. This agency is aniquated to say the least. Let's look at ARS research centers. They do not offer scientist a number of post-doctoral fellow slots like the NIH does for intramural scientists. First author papers are more highly valued by ARS than last author papers by their scientist, leaving a bit of a problem for those of us who have post-docs collaborating with ARS. I am willing to give up my last author slot to my ARS collaborator in order to make sure my post-doc gets the first author slot (when the bulk of the science and writing was done by them). However, my colleague cannot do this without losing points in the evaluative process within ARS. The entire way that ARS does science is out of step with those of us familiar with the NIH or NSF based systems.
I am uniquely positioned to comment on this point in that I have NIH money and money to work on, believe or not, cattle. Yes, we have a program in place to look at finishing diets to produce n-3 fatty acid enriched beef for consumption by the American public. On the other hand, we work on the mechanisms by which alpha-synuclein influences brain lipid metabolism and downstream physiological events such as inflammation. On one hand our research is to find a functional food to that will enable Americans to consume more n-3 fatty acids, a gate to plate idea. While it has health benefit potential, at the current stage it is all animal science and certainly not what most medical school faculty do for a passion. I suggest that instead of starting a new agency that will involve a tremendous waste of money, that the good senators examine the radical idea of moving ARS forward to more of an NIH model to serve the American public, ARS intramural scientist and their collaborators with a more progressive, modern model under which science can then be moved forward. |
Register for FREE Online Access
- »Current issue
- »Best Places to Work and Salary surveys
- »Daily news and monthly contents emails
Subscribe to the Magazine
- »Monthly print issues
- »Unlimited online access
- »Special offers on books, apparel, and more