NIH Grantees: Where Have All the Young Ones Gone?

RESEARCH FUNDINGAccording to statistics released last month by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the percentage of biomedical grants awarded to 35-and-under investigators has plummeted from 23% in 1980 to below 4% last year. Meanwhile, as Congress has pumped funds into doubling NIH's budget, the share of grants to scientists age 46 and older has grown sharply. The trend is not new, nor has it gone unnoticed.