A new digital archive developed by Northwestern scientists reveals how state-supported research funding agencies cooperate with the scientific community to decide to support scientific research projects and contribute to scientific innovation, as detailed in a recent study published in Nature Communications.   

Thomas Stoeger, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, was a co-corresponding author of the study.  

State-funded scientific research agencies are crucial for supporting the scientific enterprise through allocating taxpayer dollars to fund scientific research and supporting the employment of scientists and the development of shared resources for the scientific community, according to the authors.  

Precisely how these funding agencies work with academic communities and decide to support certain scientific projects over others, however, and has long remained a “black box” to the scientific community.   

“Why do certain projects never succeed? Why do they fail? Why do some never get funded? These are all questions we’re dying to know and at the very core to understanding how science works, but no one has really been able to study at scale how that’s done,” said Spencer Hong, ‘25 PhD, a former graduate student at the McCormick School of Engineering and lead author of the study. 

To address this challenge, Stoeger’s team developed a digital archive assembled by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to identify and characterize both decisions and developments made in the field of genomics. The NHGRI was established in 1989 to represent the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the international Human Genome Project to map the human genome. 

The archive documents the development of the field of genomics across model organism sequencing, human variation research and genetic epidemiology.  

From these documents, the scientists identified how NHGRI directly responded to scientific communities by creating resources that would create impactful technology (genome-wide association studies), how NHGRI leadership engaged with the external scientific community to resolve complex technical issues in large collaborations, and how together they decided upon funding proposals for the sequencing of non-human organisms. 

Through a custom legal and computational framework to retrieve archival data, the authors allowed internal government documents to be accessible to AI and academic scholars. 

“This is an incredible reminder of the brilliant, revolutionary work that the NIH has done across a dozen fields. In the context of AI, the power of AI is clearly in this paper but also the importance of ethical, responsible and responsive AI research,” said Christopher Donohue, PhD, a former historian at the NHGRI at the NIH and a researcher at the Institute for Clinical and Translational Science at the University of California, Irvine, who was a co-corresponding author of the study. 

Furthermore, the archive is a reminder of the importance of state-funded research agencies supporting the early stages of contemporary scientific fields, such as genomics, and emerging technologies, according to the authors.  

“Science takes time and science takes foresight,” Hong said. “What we see throughout the paper is that a lot of really beneficial and impactful technology was in development and was in need of support years before it ever made it to publication or for the scientific community to use and therefore downstream affect us, the public.” 

Co-authors of the study include Mohammad Hosseini, PhD, assistant professor of Preventive Medicine in the Division of Biostatistics and Informatics, and Kristi Holmes, PhD, associate dean for Knowledge Management and Strategy and director of the Galter Health Sciences Library.  

This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (DMS-2235451) and Simons Foundation (MP-TMPS-00005320) to the National Science Foundation F-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB).