Is Australia's NHMRC grant assessment process corrupted?

In 2013-2014 I led an unsuccessful "Centre of Research Excellence" grant application to Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC). We proposed to train 15 early career researchers (10 PhDs, 5 post docs). It was my third attempt, but the first time I had led such an application. We were unsuccessful. Nothing surprising there; these grants are notoriously difficult.

However, this grant application (and the previous two) was relevant to climate change, heatwaves and how ecological changes might change infectious diseases epidemiology. Several projects integrated various aspects of these problems. We also had an extensive "research translation" component, involving many community and professional groups. We had advice and support from the Chief Medical Officer of Australia, the Chief Veterinary Officer of Australia and we had the Department of Defence as an Associate Investigator, including for a study to assess the impact of extreme heat on their workforce. It was the best of the three (group) grant applications I have been closely involved with and many people commented on how much they liked it.

But not the assessors. One, especially, ridiculed it, showing his (or her) own bias and lack of diligence. Reviews are an opaque, anonymous process. People whose names we don't know can and in this case did make factually wrong and even insulting comments about us (our names and CVs are of course shown to them), and there is nothing we can realistically do. We did complain, having little faith in a fair hearing, but the NHMRC response to our appeal was perfunctory, showing the same bias and a dismissiveness bordering on contempt.
 

Someone I know who had worked for a while with the NHMRC commented that while they are not “corrupt” (as I had suggested) that they “bend over backwards to not get the Minister (of Health) offside”. Our current Minister of Health, Peter Dutton, is a former drug squad policeman. I have watched him a bit on the ABC. He seems to have a very simplistic understanding of health, such as that it primarily arises from hospitals, health care workers and technologies such as new drugs and maybe surgical techniques, rather than underlying health determinants, such as the expectation of a fair go in the Lucky Country. He could learn from Sir Harry Burns, the former chief medical officer of Scotland who states "we need compassion, not judgments about poor people'.

We all recognize science under the Soviet Union was corrupted; McCarthyism in the US influenced many things (not sure if this included science), George Bush junior's regime did, too. I think for a while, under the Bush/Cheney regime, investigations into whether ground water quality was affected by fracking were legally prohibited.

It would be very naive to think that Australian science is entirely free of such taint, though much of it probably operates via self-censorship, nods rather than spoken or written directions.

The standard advice about applying for scientific grants in Australia is that assessments are random and good applicants should persist. But in the case of climate change and health I do not believe this is the case. And I believe it is in the national interest to state this. Eventually, those with power in the NHMRC system will realise the harm their outmoded beliefs are doing.

Of course, you, the average reader, have no idea if I am exaggerating or simply whinging. Some will assume I have no grounds for complaint. I am, however, the sole editor of the book Climate Change and Global Health. I am one of the three Australian contributors to the health chapter of the most recent IPCC report. I am a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (in 2010). I have given over 70 invited talks at conferences and as special lectures overseas. I am approaching retirement. I do not expect to ever get an NHMRC grant. I do not see how publishing this can do me any good at all, personally, though probably no one of any influence will notice this blog.

But I sincerely feel my perception of bias has validity; it fits with other evidence of disdain for the risk of climate change by the Australian government, and I need to get this off my chest. Keeping quiet about this will do no good either.

Postscript 1 (added February 5, 2017)

In 2017 an article was published in Nature Climate Change also complaining of the lack of NHMRC support for this area. See also a good report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

In late 2014 I became the first Australian IPCC contributor to be arrested for climate disobedience. I explained some of my reasons here. As a result I can no longer go the US. I am still without a grant. The world is burning, from Chile to Syria. And the leader of the free world is a practitioner of "truthful hyperbole", in other words deliberately exaggerating for pride, profit or power.

Climate Change and Global Health was released as a paperback in mid-2016, with an additional chapter. There is more about it, here.

Postscript 2 (added January 15, 2019)

One of our 15 research projects was to consider the possible effect  to the Australian blood supply, in conjunction with the Red Cross, from heatstress and "batfall". Understanding this issue remains vital, and ever more urgent. It is prudent to advise animal rescuers and others to avoid contact with stressed and injured bats, but much more than this is needed.

Postscript 3 (added October 12, 2021)

I'm speaking on October 16, 2021 at the 20th anniversary conference of Drs for the Environment (Australia)* https://www.dea.org.au/event/save-the-date-idea-conference/
 

My talk says in part "Heat and humidity may also have a “long tail” of adverse effects, including on chronic diseases – not just MS, but conditions such as organ failure and even dementia. This is plausible because extreme heat and humidity cause excess mortality. What happens to people who are vulnerable, eg from a chronic illness – but who do not die? It is unlikely that all will return to their previous level of function. I’ve tried several times to win research funds to study this question, so far without success. The question is under-explored."

For the record, this hypothesis (conceived and witten by me) was in NHMRC grant applications I submitted in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. None of these attempts were funded.

* Drs for the Environment Australia now has over 2,500 members; I recall when there were fewer than ten.

The FAO and the other “Rome Consensus”

Publicity and acclaim have accompanied the release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by French economist Thomas Piketty. Irrespective of the details of Piketty’s argument, there is broad agreement that inequality has risen - at least in the Anglosphere - since the ascendancy of marketism (neoliberalism), under the influence of the economist Friedman, US President Reagan and others at the end of the 1970s, when norms inhibiting the flaunting of wealth since the Great Depression weakened.

Reviewing Piketty’s book, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman ruminated that the US political class may be actively working to restore a hereditary gilded age. Discussion of Piketty’s book does not mention global inequality, but while the trend of this is similar to that in Western countries, it is much higher in absolute terms. 

A manifestation and cause of this global inequality is extreme deprivation, including of access to food and adequate nutrition, which is essential for brain development, health, and the capacity to work. These attributes are needed not only to escape poverty through labour and education, but to agitate and organize for political reform. However, just as most dominant economists ignore (or even celebrate) inequality (following the “Washington Consensus” proclaimed, by its influential supporters including the Bretton Woods institutions, as ostensibly, the easiest path to economic growth and progress), so too, most agricultural economists support what I am calling (at least for the moment) the other “Rome consensus”. (There are other versions of the Rome Consensus which have nothing to do with food security).

The influence of market forces on academic careers and related publication bias is very strong; thus "group think" also extends to downplaying the risk from climate change and, more broadly,  civilization’s collapse. I suggest it infects a good fraction of academics, including the Rome Consensus. Paul Ehrlich argues similarly.

Central to the Rome consensus is the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, (FAO), headquartered in Rome. The FAO, from its inception, has (albeit probably always leavened by some people who are more concerned with reducing root causes) been opposed to policies that prioritise the redistribution of either food or the economic and political power identified by Amartya Sen and others as ultimately determining hunger. Indeed, nascent neoliberalism ensured that the FAO's first director general, Dr Boyd Orr, was appointed for only two years. Orr was regarded by the US government and its supporters as an excessively strong advocate for the poor.

The FAO often lament that at least 800 million of the global population (over 7.2 billion in 2014) are macronutrient deficient (ie short of energy (calories) and/or protein (essential amino acids). In this, the FAO has numerous supporters, both in agri-business and among academics, including most agricultural economists.

But, how sincere are the claims made by the Rome Consensus? When I first wrote this draft I suggested the Rome consensus has become accustomed to the idea that the current number of hungry people in the world (however defined) is not that bad, and that the policies it supports (including substantial use of fossil fuels) are the best way to gradually reduce hunger and poverty. Two years later (April 2015) I am a less adamant; perhaps forces for reform are becoming dominant. My paper on this topic has just been published in the journal Global Food Security. However, one reviewer of it  wrote that all traces of criticism of the FAO must be expunged - making me wonder if the FAO is really seen as perfect, as some see the other great Roman institution, the Vatican.

Here are eight examples of FAO-supported policies and practices which concerned me in 2013:

1.   Its persistent focus on food production rather than genuine support for the redistribution of the determinants of food entitlement. This is tacit support for the Pareto Principle,[ii] (developed by Mussolini’s favourite economist). This might be changing?

2.   Implicit denial of limits to growth, whether from climate change, rising energy costs, the opportunity costs of biofuels from edible plants, the emerging scarcity of phosphorus, or the flattening of crop yield growth.

3.  Ignorance and even suppression of discussion of the determinants of population growth, including ignorance or dismissal of the economic harm of rapid population growth in low-income settings.

4.  Collective dismissal (or at least oversight) of the science behind the World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity (WSWH) (1992) which led to its wildly optimistic World Food Summit hunger target set in 1996 at the lavish World Food Summit meeting. Note that Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug (“father” of the Green Revolution), who favoured family planning was a signatory of the WSWH.

5.  FAO’s delay, suggestive of complacency, to consider climate change and food security as important until 2003, when the literature raised this as serious since at least 1994.

6.  In SOFI 2012 the FAO re-defined the MDG target associated with hunger. This reflects poor scholarship and oversight, rather than ideology, as the error is extremely embarrassing (or should be!) In SOFI 2013, the FAO reverted to the original (correct) MDG definition, without explanation, admission of error, nor apology.

7. Changing the way the FAO measures hunger in ways to make the MDG target look less out of reach. However -- perhaps -- the new method is an improvement.

8. Support for agricultural intensification as a partial solution, with insufficient recognition of its numerous hazards (not to mention the cruelty of CAFOs).

If a theatre is in fire the observer has a duty to raise the alarm. The world today already has 700-900 million people undernourished in macronutrient terms, with the well-being of billions more at threat. Agreeing with the Rome Consensus will not help those people; loud complaining might yet do some good.

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[i] Defined by WHO as policies the US government and international financial institutions based in Washington DC believed countries should follow to increase economic growth (as conventionally defined) 
[ii] Essentially, that redistribution should always be avoided by growth, so that a bigger pie is shared, so that the poor are assisted without reducing the wealth of the rich.