Program Administration 



in the Division has been to develop complementary but integrated activities 

 involving the Centers as well as Headquarters. 



Personnel 



The work force that carries out the NASA Life Sciences program is a composite of 

 career civil servants, extramural scientists, and contractor staff. As with most 

 research agencies, the program relies on external grantees and contractors to 

 conduct NASA-funded research. Unlike most research agencies, however, the work 

 that is conducted on NASA premises depends heavily on contractors and other 

 external researchers. It is not unusual to find an activity with a few NASA career 

 staff, many contractors, and university faculty or students who are using NASA 

 facilities for their research. 



As a result of various policies and practices, the permanent staff of the Life 

 Sciences Division is a relatively homogeneous group, largely composed of 

 individuals who have been in the organization for many years. This pattern is not 

 unique to the Division; the average age of NASA personnel is 46 and increasing 

 by almost a year per year. In a field where scientific changes occur rapidly, with- 

 out the opportunity for new, younger hires, the aging staff is not always as 

 current about recent developments as one might hope. Concern has also been 

 expressed about the ability of the program to attract young scientists to its 

 permanent staff when research opportunities and, hence, career development are 

 subject to change. 



Use of Outside Advice 



Although the Life Sciences Division has called on advice from outside individuals 

 and groups in a number of ways, two processes exist to structure the day-to-day 

 use of outside advice — the peer-review process and the solicitation process. 



Peer Reviezv. The past procedures established within the Division to evaluate 

 research proposals followed the separation between ground-based research and 

 flight experiments. The ground-based research proposals, funded as "research and 

 analysis," were evaluated by standing outside panels organized along the Division's 

 program lines. Since 1965, these advisory panels have been formed and staffed by 

 the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), an umbrella organization 

 comprising more than 40 scientific societies and individual scientists. 



The panels established for each of the major research and analysis program 

 areas — Space Medicine, Space Biology, Exobiology, Biospherics, and CELSS — 

 were constructed as standing multidisciplinary groups in which breadth and depth 

 of knowledge are valued. Unlike peer panels in some other agencies, such as 

 N1H, the groups reflect a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous slice of science. 

 As a result, the panel's evaluation of proposals is based on two kinds of 

 assessments: it depends on the one or two panel members who have specific 

 expertise in the area proposed, and it calls upon the judgment of relative 

 outsiders to the field to determine the relationship of the individual proposal to 

 overall program goals. To this point, all research proposals — whether submitted 



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