NATURE MEDICINE • VOLUME 5 • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 1999 9

NEWS

that people get demoralized, get out ofresearch, or start looking for greener pastures.”

ASMR secretary Judy Halliday confirmsthat it is getting harder to obtain a grant:the ‘cut-off point’ or NHMRC-awardedrank out of ten below which an applica-tion fails has crept steadily upwards from7.6 in 1991 to 8.1 this year. “Many good,internationally competitive grants are notgetting funded,” says Halliday.

NHMRC research chairman WarwickAnderson says that although fewer pro-jects had been funded this year, those thatwere successful would get more money fora longer period in a bid to consolidate theresearch base. And on the eve of the bud-get announcement, Anderson voiced con-cern that poor funding of Australianresearch puts the country behind in thenew era of molecular biology andgenomics research. While he does notwant to see “all the eggs in that basket,”Anderson warns that the funding avail-able now is spread too thin. “We need todo a whole lot more if we’re going to ridethat biotechnology wave, and that meansmore government, private and charitablemoney for research,” he told NatureMedicine.

At least the NHMRC has evidence that itis picking winners: a new bibliometricstudy to be released this month by Aus-tralian National University researchersLinda Butler and Paul Bourke showsNHMRC-backed research is cited dispro-portionately often in international publi-cations. Of publications in the top one per-cent (those cited by at least 60 otherpapers), two percent of researchers were

funded by the NHMRC, and tenpercent of authors in the topfive percent of papers wereNHMRC-funded. “We’re reas-sured our mechanisms do iden-tify some of the best Australianresearch and that’s recognizedinternationally by the citationsin those papers,” says Anderson.

Not surprisingly, the researchcommunity has backed Wills’call for NHMRC funding to be

doubled in five years, and for the appoint-ment of a full-time paid chief executiveofficer to run the organization, replacingthe current part-time honorary chairman.The document is open for consultationuntil April, after which the governmentwill prepare its response.

RADA ROUSE, BRISBANE

Researchers benefitat BMS award night

At a ceremony at New York’s famousPierre Hotel last month, Bernard Roiz-man, professor of Virology at the Univer-sity of Chicago, received a personal checkfor $50,000 from thepharmaceutical com-pany, Bristol-MyersSquibb (BMS), aswinner of the compa-ny’s DistinguishedAchievement Awardin Infectious DiseaseResearch. David Ho,scientific director andCEO of the AaronDiamond AIDS Research Center, NewYork, and Gordon Archer, professor ofmedicine at Virginia Commonwealth Uni-versity, both received research funds of$500,000 over five years.

The evening marked the last in a seriesof six annual award nights in different dis-ciplines for 1998: Distinguished Achieve-ment Awards for cancer (Michael Sporn),cardiovascular (Philip Majerus), neuro-science (Richard Axel), nutrition (GeorgeBeaton) and orthopedic research (WilliamCole) were also made last year, alongwith two additional research prizes ineach category. Ho told Nature Medicinethat the BMS research funds are uniquebecause they are given truly with “nostrings attached.”

Roizman is known for his work on her-pes simplex virus (HSV). He mapped theHSV genome, developed recombinantDNA techniques that reveal the role ofspecific genes in the viral life cycle andlaid the groundwork for current efforts todevelop a vaccine against the virus.

Roizman accepted his award gra-ciously, and used the occasion to voicehis belief that although scientific traininghas improved since his graduate schooldays, it may have “gone too far.” Hedeclared that the system is creating “acadre of professionals with few outstand-ing scientists in their midst,” a processthat is “becoming more and more evi-dent as new faculty members with excel-lent records of publications…flounder forseveral years as they become fully inde-pendent.” He called for an overhaul ofgraduate education to make it a trueresearch education “rather than a sourceof dedicated cheap labor.”

KAREN BIRMINGHAM, NEW YORK

Australian research grant awards remain staticAustralian researchers—despondent inthe wake of another slide in the successrate for National Health and MedicalResearch Council (NHMRC) grant appli-cations—are looking to the federal gov-ernment for a positive response to thefirst comprehensive review of the bio-medical research sector since the 1970s,the ‘Wills Report,’ which was released onDecember 10th.

Officially titled the Health and MedicalResearch Strategic Review, the WillsReport is a discussion paper pulledtogether by a 12 member committeeheaded by Peter Wills. It warns that whileAustralia spends AUS$28 (US$17) percapita on medical R&D, the Organisationfor Economic Co-operation and Develop-ment average for developed nations isaround AUS$66 per capita. The report alsoidentifies other barriers to Australia mak-ing headway in the biomedical revolu-tion, such as a crippling tax regime forR&D companies.

The Wills Report was released threeweeks after the health and medicalresearch grants for FY99 were announced.These funds—favoring research into can-cer, cardiovascular disease and neuro-science—are distributed by the NHMRCin its capacity as the nation’s leadinghealth and advisory research body. Fed-eral health minister Michael Wooldridge,described the funding as the “lifeblood”of the research community: AUS$46 mil-lion was made available for new grants on353 projects, and AUS$116 will fund 833existing projects.

However, key lobbyists such as Aus-tralian Society for Medical Research(ASMR) president Steven Wes-selingh say this blood is beingdrained: although the numberof grants available has barelyfluctuated over the pastdecade, more researchers arecompeting for them.

In 1990, 353 grants were suc-cessful out of 1,060 submit-ted—a success rate of 33 per-cent. This year the samenumber of grants was awardedfrom a field of 1,435, thus reducing thesuccess rate to 24.6 percent. “If you getless than 25 percent you’re really going torip the heart out of the research commu-nity,” says Wesselingh. NHMRC researchcommittee chairman Professor WarwickAnderson concedes that “once you get tovery low success rates you run the risk

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