The $328.1 billion US omnibus spending measure, which funds the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is now in the hands of the Senate, includes a small but unusual $7.5 million appropriation. That amount would be distributed at NIH director Elias Zerhouni's discretion, would be dedicated to research projects whose focuses fall outside traditional interests, and, researchers and advocates say, could help establish how science will be conducted in the future.

The bill's current language says the money was included to “demonstrate whether this funding mechanism would accelerate the research agenda.” A spokesman said the NIH does not normally talk about pending appropriations legislation, and several members of Congress did not return calls seeking comment. The House of Representatives passed the appropriations bill in early December, and the Senate will consider it in January.

The plan's particulars are still being worked out, but those interviewed said that the peer-review process would not be bypassed. Instead of putting grant applications before the NIH's established review committees, scientists from numerous disciplines would consider the research's merits.

The idea, said Harold Shapiro, president emeritus of Princeton University, is to assemble a panel that is primarily charged to see what risks are out there to take. “The standard review panels have quite enough to do [without the] confusion of roles when trying to deal with this,” said Shapiro, who chaired a National Academies' Institute of Medicine and National Research Council committee that produced a July report saying that the NIH's size had made it too unmanageable to conduct the most effective research.

Those interviewed seem excited about this funding. For a long time, they said, the NIH has been risk-averse, approving projects that were pigeonholed into narrow research areas. While such focus has merit, many diseases cross too many disciplines for one type of scientist, or institute, to study them.

“Important research on the border [between NIH research centers]… doesn't get the attention it needs because it's not in the main stream of a study section,” the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology's Howard Garrison told The Scientist. “The feeling is that the creative stuff doesn't get the attention that it merits. To set up a system that gets that attention is a very big challenge. This is an effort to figure out a way” to do it.

Finding treatments for complex diseases such as diabetes and schizophrenia will not yield to a single-minded approach, said William F. Crowley Jr., a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “The problem with the legislation is that this is far too little money, but it is a beginning,” said Crowley, who founded the Academic Health Centers Clinical Research Forum, which wants to streamline the path to clinical research.

The other problem, he said, is that some researchers might resist the idea. Many basic scientists consider individual R01 grants – awarded for major research projects with a high likelihood of advancing scientific understanding – and scientific independence as arbiters of success, he said. But “the future, in many ways, [will involve] team-coordinated research across many disciplines, an interdependence of scientific” technologies,” he said. It will be hard, Crowley told The Scientist, to get people away from the “RO1 mentality.”

Not necessarily, countered Garrison. “At the level this is being proposed, people will support [it]. These are scientists. They love experiments.”

This research-funding approach is part and parcel of the NIH's new Roadmap, a blueprint written with the input of 300 leaders in academia, industry, government and the public. Eventually, the plan is expected to cost about $2 billion a year – paid for by taking about half a percent from the budgets of each of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers.

Said Crowley: [Zerhouni] just listened and saw this is as an engineer sees things. It's nobody's fault…We have a system designed to do something different than what we want now.”

Reinventing how research gets done in this country is not about money, Shapiro told The Scientist. “It's a question of attitude and approach…. and will.”