As a young professor I feel less optimistic than ever about my chosen career, and the extent to which concerns about offset of my salary is such a prominent part of what I am charged to worry about day to day. I work at a top academic medical center who happily extracts teaching and administrative service from its faculty and pays lip service to the importance of such activity to promotions and tenure, but my raises and compensation are completely tied to extramural funding. The message is that all other activities are worthless. Many institutions are now moving to 5 year renewable contract rather than tenure, which is further undermining academic freedom. Soon, only "fundable" ideas will be pursued in labs throughout the country. Only schools with significant endowment dollars who are capable of investment in their faculty will produce cutting edge science.

I feel that the "2 NIH grant model" is unsustainable going forward. I would suggest that academic medical centers simply scale back and only hire faculty that it can afford, rather than leverage NIH dollars for growth of the research enterprise at their institution. I'm unsure of the proper fiscal model, but many of our problems stem from this cardinal need to pay our own salaries. I would suggest that NIH adopt a HHMI like system that pays a portion of research salary for productive scientists, and let grants be applied to all non-PI salary. A system like that would provide stability for researchers, and would reduce the number of poor quality grants that are submitted primarily to "feed the beast".