Tom Insel headed the NIMH from 2002 to 2015. Wikipedia says he worked until November of the final year but does not specify the month in which he started. He quite famously, and I am paraphrasing, told the behavioral scientists to GTFO almost immediately*. This applied equally to those interested in animal behavioral models and those interested in human behavior from an experimental perspective. This, to my recollection, dismayed many scientists who had found a funding home at the NIMH for many years and even decades. This included both experienced PIs and newer ones who had been trained in NIMH funded laboratories. When asked who was supposed to fund basic behavioral work, Insel said, again paraphrasing, “not my problem”*.

Another relevant memory vignette. I had a brief postdoc mentor who went to NIMH as a program officer around 1996 and I ran into him sometime in the 20-teens, perhaps just after Insel had departed, maybe earlier. He described to me how he and some other Program Officers had tried to slow the carnage. Tried to delay Insel’s full plan to kick all of the basic behavioral work out of NIMH. And how they ultimately were overcome in the end.

Today on the socials I was challenged when I asserted my understanding and recollection on this topic. If I am reading correctly I was informed that Insel was not so bad and that the prior NIMH Director, Steven Hyman (1996-2001) was worse.

I had the thought that I could get at this history, albeit somewhat indirectly, over on RePORTER by searching for new R01 by Fiscal Year while gating on Department. This lacks precision, of course. Discipline boundaries drawn by the Department are fuzzy indeed. But I think we can make some assumptions about relative proportions of research types that inhabit Departments. I was first curious what the impact was on the funding of new R01 to Psychology departments. This is a decent proxy for a lot of the basic behavioral science that Insel was after and the home department of many folks I recall complaining about this.

I started the brown color shading in FY2003 because I don’t know when Insel was hired and therefore when his decision making hit the ground in 2002 and behavioral grants went in the toilet. Insel’s departure in November 2015 means he was making the call on everything in that final FY.

As a reminder the NIH doubling interval was 1998-2003.

What I see from this is the end of the doubling was good for Psychology departments, which received 58-59 awards from 2000-2002. At the end of the Insel era, this was down to 19-21 awards from 2013-2015. Roughly one third of where the number had been pre-Insel, or a 67% reduction. This trend also makes it look like the internal resistance finally lost steam in FY2011. Permanently. Until Insel departed.

It is interesting to note the awards to Psychology Departments improved immediately after Insel left. Even while we were mired in terrible success rates overall.

What about Psychiatry Departments? My experience is that the NIH grant funded people are a mixed bag including a lot of clinical research and some basic science. Many of the colleagues that I think of as being in my subfield, and certainly many with a behavioral focus, exist in such departments.

There is a very similar run up at the end of the doubling, as expected. There was a clear reduction across the interval of Insel’s tenure as Director, although much smaller in relative magnitude. Roughly speaking, down to ~60 awards from the heights of ~80 awards, or a 25% reduction. As with the Psychology departments, there appeared to be some recovery of numbers in the decade post-Insel. [ETA: This analysis complains that clinical research at NIMH did not recover post-Insel.] It would seem to me to be a reasonable assumption that the basic behavioral work in Psychiatry was taking a bath under Insel, but the relative proportions were lower compared with Psychology departments.

So who was getting funded? Well, one obvious suspect would be those who were in departments of Neurosciences. There are many fewer of these awarded by NIMH and I am not suggesting I am doing a forensic examination of where the grants went. I gave up on this before I turned to Biology departments. But you can get a good idea of relative priority here. I don’t know what we should make of FY2002 and whether this is where the late doubling trend takes us, or if it was an unusual aberration from 2001 and 2003 levels. If the latter, there was no reduction in grants awarded early in the Insel years. But either way, it is clear that Neurosciences PIs did quite well in the later Insel years, continuing to gain ground past where they were late in the doubling interval.

As we contemplate the 2/3 reduction in NIMH awards to Psychology Departments, we cannot know if other NIH ICs simply picked up the slack. Seems unlikely, they all had their own constituencies and priorities before Insel, and NIMH was then, and is now, one of the lions’share ICs. We also don’t know for sure if these PIs simply…went away. Stopped applying. This seems highly unlikely and it seem vastly more likely that they kept pounding away with applications at a reduced success rate. I’d like to see those data some day. And if this is the case, it is worth reminding you what it takes to gain an equivalent cumulative probability of award when the success rates plummet.

CODA: Since Director Hyman presided over the NIMH during the great NIH doubling, I think it is very hard to say much of anything about his bias for or against PIs in these three Departments. Awards were growing along with the budget in all three.

*ETA: This 2005 news bit in Psychological Science has some key Insel quotes, including this one: “The anxiety is that we’re trying to squash a field,” he said. “I would say that we’re trying to nudge the field and encourage it to become broader and much more mechanistic. What we’re hoping is that the best basic behavioral research will get more tied into biology and into the relevance of the public health challenge.” What he disingenuously omits is that “more mechanistic” inevitably means “less behavioral”. Which is when we end up with constrained behaviors that may not reflect the human condition well, sending us on so called mechanistic wild goose chases when there is no “there” there or when it is the wrong “there”.