Despite possible cutbacks in the NIH's 2012 budget, its Director Francis Collins plans to launch an award in 2011 that would make it possible for promising young investigators to skip the postdoc stage and give them five years of funding to open their own labs. S. Pelech questions whether allowing these recent graduate students to skip the postdoc stage and to providing them with 5 years of funding to open their own labs is really a faster way to waste money and doom a promising young investigator to early failure. Read More...

Tags: Grant Funding, Francis Collins, New principal investigators

Blogger Morgan at The Scientist's Naturally Selected blog offered some tips for writing successful grant applications. S. Pelech suggests that a strategy, that while humorous, seems to work quite well based on his experience in grant panels. Read More...

Tags: Grant Funding, Grant applications

Jeremy Berg, the director of National Institute of General Medical Sciences observed in his analysis of NIGMS R01 applications from January 2010 that "many of the awards made for applications with less favorable percentile scores go to early stage and new investigators." S. Pelech comments that while this is not surprising, it is disturbing that new grant applications from experienced investigators that have a track record of successful funding have about the same chance at getting funded as a new investigator with little experience and no track record as an independent scientist. Read More...

Tags: Grant Funding, NIH

Funding success rates are down, in part because of the economic downturn, and this has further increased competition for funding and placed more pressure on applicants and reviewers. S. Pelech comments that in his experience, while there has been a steady improvement in the quality of submitted grant applications over the last 25 years, there has also been a concurrent errosion in the quality of grant reviews. He also notes that the growing trend towards funding mega-projects has also resulted in less demonstrated productivity per research dollar invested. Read More...

Tags: Grant Funding, Grant reviewing

Nicholas Wade at the New York Times characterized NIH's funding of basic research as a risky government venture that produces far fewer hits than misses, but blogger Michael White at Science 2.0 thinks that basic research proceeds more through a series of "incremental" advancements that ultimately lead to success. S. Pelech agrees with Dr. White and notes that grant panels favour "safe" research where there are solid hypotheses and a wealth of preliminary data from investigators with the consequence that most basic research is pedestrian and plodding, but steady in its progress. Read More...

Tags: Grant Funding, Basic Research, Research progress

Blogger DrugMonkey wrote that in March of 2009, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council proposed and later instituted a new grant application system in which researchers are banned from applying for research funding for 12 months if they've had three or more proposals ranked in the bottom half of a funding prioritization list during the past two years, or have had less than 25 percent of the proposals funded in that time. The Nature News Blog reported that grant applications in the UK are down from about 5,000 a year in the 2005-2006 cycle to less than 3,000 in the 2010-2011 cycle, and success rates are actually up. S. Pelech comments that if fewer investigators submit grant applications, then of course success rates would appear higher, even though less grant proposals are actually funded. He concludes that agencies should just award more grants with slightly lower than average budgets, and leave it to the investigators to prudently use these funds as they see most fit. Read More...

Tags: Grant Funding