Professional development. NIH report urges greater emphasis on training for all graduate students.

It’s a familiar complaint: Academic researchers intent on cranking out another paper and obtaining their next grant sometimes see their students as little more than another pair of hands rather than as scientists in training. Now comes a new report that attempts to redefi ne the goals of graduate and postdoctoral training and prods biomedical scientists to become better mentors. Similar exhortations have been made before, but the report comes from an organization with significant financial clout: the fl agship training institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). A training program should give students the skills to not only follow their adviser into academia but also pursue a variety of scientifi c career paths, says the report, written by an in-house committee at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and approved last week for dissemination by the institute’s advisory council. It reminds faculty members that they have a duty to help create a more diverse workforce. It also emphasizes that those on research grants, the most common means of NIH support for graduate students (see graph), deserve mentoring that is just as good as what is offered students on institutional training grants and fellowships. The 28-page strategic plan (www.nigms. nih.gov/Training/StrategicPlan.htm) doesn’t spell out how to accomplish those goals, however. And the initial reaction from council members suggests that many researchers and their institutions may resist changing their behavior if they think the proposed changes will hinder their research productivity. One major concern from the council is that the new approach could change how NIH scores grant applications, especially the bread-and-butter R01 grants for individual investigators. “The goal of a R01 is to discover new knowledge,” asserted Vern Schramm, a biochemist at Yeshiva University’s medical school in New York City, in kicking off the discussion at last week’s meeting. “This would expand it to include education and learning. Would those now become review criteria for study sections?” he wondered. Schramm’s comment triggered an avalanche of related questions. Some council members wondered whether the metrics for assessing the quality of training might be different from those used to weigh scientifi c progress: papers, presentations at meetings, and the like. Others asked if grantees might at some point be held accountable for career choices students make for personal reasons. Some saw the report’s call for a formal annual evaluation—called an individual development plan (IDP)—as an additional burden on already overstressed faculty members. NIGMS Director Jeremy Berg, who spearheaded the effort to draft the plan, told Schramm, “We don’t intend that to be the outcome.” He estimated that the average faculty member would devote “1 hour per trainee per year on an IDP, which is hardly excessive.” Berg said his goal is to improve how students are trained without making the process too cumbersome: “We don’t want to burden those people who are already doing a good job and continue to miss those who aren’t. We need to fi nd the sweet spot.”