Blog Comments

Kinetica Online is pleased to provide direct links to commentaries from our senior editor Dr. Steven Pelech has posted on other blogs sites. Most of these comments appear on the GenomeWeb Daily Scan website, which in turn highlight interesting blogs that have been posted at numerous sites in the blogosphere since the beginning of 2010. A wide variety of topical subjects are covered ranging from the latest scientific breakthroughs, research trends, politics and career advice. The original blogs and Dr. Pelech’s comments are summarized here under the title of the original blog. Should viewers wish to add to these discussions, they should add their comments at the original blog sites.

The views expressed by Dr. Pelech do not necessarily reflect those of the other management and staff at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation. However, we wish to encourage healthy debate that might spur improvements in how biomedical research is supported and conducted.

Research productivity

The Happy Medium

Jeremy Berg, the director of National Institute of General Medical Sciences, suggested that mid-sized labs do best from his analysis of NIH data to study correlations between grant size and scientific output. S. Pelech comments that Dr. Berg's data confirms what he and many others have suspected all along, i.e. too high amounts of funding for a laboratory group can provide diminishing returns and this has enormous implications for the funding of mega projects. Based on US NIGMS data from 2007 to mid-2010, the Division of Information Services in the NIH Office of Extramural Research determined that the median annual total direct cost was $220,000 in funding, the median number of grant-linked publications was six, and the median journal average impact factor was 5.5, which indicates that the typical costs of a scientific paper with a 5.5 impact factor is about $128,000. Read More...