14-Jul-89 23:42:32-GMT,2934;000000000001
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Full-Name: Tom Rindfleisch
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1989 16:42:28 PDT
From: TC Rindfleisch <tcr@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>
To: Shortliffe@sumex-aim.stanford.edu, Feigenbaum@sumex-aim.stanford.edu
Cc: Rindfleisch@sumex-aim.stanford.edu, KSL-Exec@sumex-aim.stanford.edu,
        SSRG-Exec@sumex-aim.stanford.edu, Businger@sumex-aim.stanford.edu
Subject: BRTP/SUMEX Status 
Message-Id: <CMM.0.88.616462948.tcr@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>

I had a long talk with Dick DuBois at NIH/BRTP this morning about the SUMEX
grant, covering the following key points:

1) The SUMEX award for the coming year is being processed now (i.e., won't be
held up for lack of resource statistics reporting forms) and will include the
14% cut we dreaded.  This means the direct cost award will drop from the
council-approved $1,362,387 down to $1,171,653, a $190,734 cut.  Relative to
the 11% cut we took last year, this is an extra $41K cut in directs but
effectively represents $120K if you include the council core system funding cap
and a 4.5% inflation rate on our real costs.  So our planning model was right
on for whatever satisfaction that provides.

2) The no-cost extension request letter I just wrote to DuBois needs to be
revised.  Turns out we can't have two overlapping grant periods (extension of
this year past 7/31 while next year starts 8/1).  Dick agreed to *add* the $8K
left in reserve from this year on to next year's award but the formal credit
may not take place until the report of expenditures (ROE) goes in.  I hope this
is not the case since Stanford sometimes takes 6-9 months to get ROE's out.
The fact that the money was in reserve means NIH can be assured that the money
was not spent (legally) and so may be willing to do the credit before the ROE
gets there.

3) Dick reinforced the indications we had gotten recently that the SUMEX grant
would be moving to NLM sooner rather than later -- probably by the end of this
FY.  According to Dick, 4 projects will be transferred from BRTP to NLM: SUMEX,
the Protein sequence resource, Lawrence's work on DNA sequence analysis tools,
and some work under Temple Smith (presumably also DNA structure related).
BRTP's current budget is around $42M/yr, 40% of which (around $17M) is related
to biomedical computing.  The 4 grants moving to NLM involve a total of about
$3.5M so not very much of the current BRTP portfolio ended up being involved.
It is not clear whether NLM will inherit any P41 (resource grant) authority
with the move or whether the formal structure of the SUMEX grant will change in
the process.  We also need to understand from DABL et al. what they have in
mind for the future, i.e., is there an opportunity to turn the SUMEX resource
into something more relevant to NLM goals that could capture longer term
funding beyond July 1991.

Tom R.

