University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: September 1, 2005

By JOHN DELLA CONTRADA
Contributing Editor

Out of the blue on a Wednesday in June came the phone call that would preoccupy the summer months of Sandra Murray, UB professor of psychology, and threaten to destroy three years' worth of her groundwork and research.

Seemingly randomly and arbitrarily, Rep. Randy Neugebauer, a Texas Republican, had targeted for elimination Murray's five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a study of the behavior of married couples.

In an amendment attached to a $602 billion health-and-education appropriations bill to be voted on by the House of Representatives, Neugebauer sought to defund Murray's grant because, he said, it failed to promote treatments for serious mental illness, which he said is the NIMH's main mission. Neugebauer's targeting of Murray's grant is part of an ongoing campaign, largely symbolic and politically motivated, that has unsuccessfully targeted other NIMH grants awarded to behavioral scientists over the past three years.

For Murray, a highly respected social psychologist, having her work singled out in such a way was, naturally, shocking at first.

"It was surreal, like winning a bad lottery," Murray says of the phone call she received from Michael Pietkiewicz, UB's director of federal relations, who had the uncomfortable job of informing Murray of Neugebauer's intentions.

"This is my life's work; it's something I care very deeply about. To have someone pluck my grant out of a hat is distressing and frightening. It makes me very angry. The experience has been horrifying. The only positive has been having the support of the scientific community—colleagues and major scientific organizations have rallied to defeat the amendment and keep this from happening again."

According to Murray, the claim that her research does not support the mission of NIMH is "patently wrong." The Public Health Service Act, she points out, includes basic behavioral research as a fundamental part of the NIMH mission.

"There are also very clear links between marital disruption and dissatisfaction, and the onset of, and recovery from, serious mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia and anxiety disorders," she says. "So if we want to reduce the incidence of disorders like depression, we need to know how to prevent relationships from becoming distressed in the first place.

"The cost of divorce is also huge—in 2002, divorce cost the taxpayers about $30 billion."

President-elect of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, Murray received the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of social psychology from the American Psychological Association in 2003. In 1999, she received the New Contribution Award from the International Society for the Study of Personal Relationships.

As the initial shock faded in the weeks that followed the phone call, Murray, with the assistance of Pietkiewicz, fellow researchers and various professional organizations, lobbied—not only to save Murray's grant, but also to protect the grant-review process from further political interference.

"These grants go through several layers of scientific reviews and Congress should not be substituting its judgment for the judgment of the peer-review process," Murray says. "Congress is not in a position to decide what is good science and what is bad science."

Satish K. Tripathi, UB provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, noted that "NIH-supported research has led to remarkable advances in human physical and mental health, and Congress does have an oversight role that is meant to ensure that these federally appropriated funds are allocated to researchers who are conducting rigorous research.

"It is, however, critically important to appreciate that individual decisions to federally fund faculty research must be made through a scientific peer-review process," Tripathi added. "The peer-review system is designed to ensure that only the highest-quality and innovative research is funded. And, in fact, we have witnessed the success of the peer-review process in the heightened quality of life of our family members, neighbors and throughout the members of our communities."

Amendment rushed to vote
A self-described crusader against government waste, Neugebauer also targeted, in addition to Murray's grant, a $598,000 NIMH grant awarded to Edward Wasserman, a professor at the University of Iowa. An experimental psychologist, Wasserman studies the visual perception of pigeons to uncover clues about abnormal perception experienced by humans suffering from schizophrenia and autism.

Neugebauer most likely randomly selected the Murray and Wasserman grants by searching for the words "marriage" and "pigeons" among the hundreds of grants listed on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) database. These terms, as well as "sex" or "happiness," are easy marks for individuals or groups who want to target grants that, at a glance, might seem frivolous or unscientific, says Karen Studwell of the American Psychological Association (APA), which is supporting Murray and Wasserman.

"There is absolutely no connection to science or scientific merit (in the way they selected the grants); they probably don't even understand the science," Studwell says. "If your grant's title sounds funny to them, that's the process they use, which is certainly not a scientific review of any type.

"I would call that arbitrary."

Backed by the Center of Treatment Advocacy, a nonprofit group pushing NIMH to fund only research grants for serious mental illnesses, Neugebauer last year successfully attached to a bill a similar amendment singling out two NIMH-funded grants awarded to social psychologists at the University of Missouri and the University of Texas at Austin. The Senate ultimately struck the amendment from the final bill.

This year, according to Pietkiewicz, Neugebauer introduced the amendment targeting Murray and Wasserman at the "last minute" on Thursday, June 23, and rushed it to vote on Friday. Grouped with other amendments, the amendment passed without debate in a voice vote by members of the House.

Pietkiewicz, who worked "feverishly" with Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R-Clarence) to kill the amendment in the 24 hours leading up to the vote, was dismayed, but not surprised, by the political expediency by which Neugebauer introduced the amendment and the House passed it.

"These are the kinds of amendments they want to be a surprise because the more time you have to actually provide information to members of Congress, the more likely they would be to oppose it," Pietkiewicz says.

Soon after the House passed the Neugebauer amendment, Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH, released a statement saying the amendment "undermines the historical strength of American science...the peer-review process."

"Defunding meritorious grants on the floor of Congress is unjustified scientific censorship," he said.

Ms. Murray goes to Washington
For the Neugebauer amendment to become law, the Senate also must approve it when the House and Senate come together in conference to hammer out the final Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill for fiscal year '06. With their grant funding hanging in the balance, Murray and Wasserman, accompanied by APA's Studwell, in mid-July visited eight members of Congress, asking them to help strike the amendment from the final bill.

As a result of the meetings, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer said they would support the peer-review process and the Murray and Wasserman grants in a letter asking for the amendment's removal, according to Studwell. Reynolds is supportive of the Murray and Wasserman grants as well, according to Pietkiewicz.

Murray and Wasserman, significantly, have garnered the support of members of the appropriations bill committee—Sens. Tom Harkin and Arlen Specter and Reps. Ralph Regula and David Obey—who will have a strong say in the final content of the bill.

"Though our discussions with these members cannot be translated as commitments, they are supportive of the peer-review process and are supportive of ensuring that Dr. Murray's and Dr. Wasserman's grants continue to be funded," says Studwell.

By law, all appropriations bills should be passed by Sept. 30 for the beginning of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1, but neither Studwell nor Pietkiewicz expect Congress to meet that deadline. Traditionally, this appropriations bill is the last to pass and confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts may further delay passage until December or January.

In the meantime, Studwell and Pietkiewicz are optimistic, and Murray has begun to feel so, too. The amendment has energized the scientific community: The APA, the Federation of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences and the Association of American Universities all have strongly lobbied for its removal.

Her work continues on
While waiting to hear whether Congress strips the Neugebauer amendment from the final bill, Murray continues with the research funded by the NIMH grant. Her study of the behavior of newlyweds is in its second year. The goal of the research is to determine how self-esteem and perceived rejection within a marriage affect marital satisfaction and success. Murray last year began work with 200 married couples who are keeping electronic diaries of their spousal interactions.

The National Science Foundation also had reviewed and selected Murray's research proposal for funding, but Murray accepted the NIMH grant because it provided more financial support. It is highly unusual for both agencies with rigorous and independent peer review processes to approve a grant for funding.

"When I first heard about (the amendment), it preoccupied me for a month, but then I decided to stop ruminating and get back to work," Murray says. "I have students supported on the grant, staff supported on the grant, and the work has to get done.

"The NIH has every expectation that the amendment will be removed," Murray says. "I certainly hope so because, if not, the research project will be destroyed. Many years of preparation went into the grant application, and if the project is stopped, all of the knowledge that could be gained will be lost."

According to Murray, the attacks on grants awarded to behavioral scientists are misinformed and appear to be part of a broader, anti-science agenda within Congress. Behavioral science is a particularly easy political target, she says, because "hindsight bias" often affects the casual observer's opinion of the research's value. In other words, people often think they "already knew" the outcome of behavioral research upon hearing the results.

"People think they know the answers to questions about what makes a relationship strong or weak, but people's intuitions are often wrong," Murray explains. "If we want to understand what makes a relationship work, we need to have a scientific understanding of the issues.

"The same scientific principles are applied to understanding people's behavior as are applied to understanding the behavior of electrons used by scientists in other disciplines, such as chemistry or physics."

UB faculty, administration and all of academe should fight to protect the peer-review process from further political interference, Murray says, because excessive political scrutiny of behavioral science likely will spread to other sciences as well.

"Occasionally people ask me, 'Well, what did you do (to have my grant singled out in the amendment)?' I didn't do anything; I just went about my business doing my research. This can happen to anybody," Murray says.

"If Congress continues to retroactively defund grants, science as a whole is in a huge amount of trouble because Congress doesn't have the expertise to decide which kinds of grants are worthy of support and which are not. Scientists understand that there is a limited amount of money; that's why there is a peer-review process that decides which grants are most scientifically meritorious."