The subject of research funding comes up in the news from time to time and usually not in a good way. We're spending too much on this. We should spend less on that. A racy study got funded that's upsetting some folks. Some other study got funded that's not really racy but it's also upsetting some folks. Scientists are participating in a global conspiracy to fudge results to keep the money spigot flowing (I wish).
Yet, for all of this bark bark, I'd bet the average citizen has no idea what's involved in getting the government to pony up grant money. Is it just a phone call? A secret handshake? How do eggheads get their paws on your hard-earned tax dollars?
Well LabKitty is here to help. Today, I break the academic's omertá to give you a glimpse inside the grant application sausage factory. Risking life and limb to bring this sordid tale to light, I am, although not really because, let's face it, most university faculty have little garter-snake arms that'll snap right off at the elbows. It's not like they're going to come after me. Still, I like to think of myself as the Erin Brockovich of research funding, albeit not quite so bosomy.
So if you ever wondered how the wheels of progress get greased, ever wanted a gander at the sweaty guys below decks shoveling coal and money into the great boilers of research, ever wanted to wander backstage at FundingPalooza, ever wondered how science turns adorable barnyard animals into tasty treats, then this one's for you.
Read on, citizen, and become better-informed.
Suppose you have an idea for a research and have found yourself in a position (read: most universities) where your chairman/dean/president expects you to petition the government for money that will pay for you turning your head music into actual real results that get published and feed the wheels of industry and progress. It turns out there are government entities such as the National Institutes of Health (henceforth: NIH) and the National Science Foundation (henceforth: NSF) who devote a substantial portion of their operating budget into helping university drones such as yourself transform dreams into reality. All that is required is to submit a grant proposal of the appropriate type to the appropriate agency when they announce they're accepting applications, which is usually twice a year.
Footnote: It goes without saying that first-rate research is done all over the world. But I only have experience with the U.S. funding machine, so I am only going to talk about the U.S. funding machine. Nosce te ipsum, and all that.
There's an entire acronym alphabet soup of different grant types, so to simplify things I here focus on that workhorse of university funding: the hallowed R01 (pronounced "arr-oh-one"). An R01 can put substantial coin into a researcher's purse, occasionally to the tune of several million dollars spread over 3-5 years. The NIH tends to be where the big money lives, more so than the NSF. Perhaps it's easier to convince Congress to open their hearts and wallets when your mission is beating back cancer and less so for beating the Swiss to the Higgs. In any event, I'm going to focus on NIH funding because I'm less familiar with the NSF.
The NIH is divvied up into various subagencies, which helps you decide where to send your proposal. So, for example, there's the National Cancer Institute (NCI) which funds cancer research and the National Eye Institute (NEI) which funds eye research and the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) which funds research on things like stroke and epilepsy. Occasionally, special cross-disciplinary funding programs are created, say when the First Lady gets a bug up her butt about something. These programs look good standing behind a podium, but the long-term effects are often disastrous. Famously, there was the NIH's "Decade of the Brain" which pumped a bunch of extra money into brain research awhile back. Predictably, the ranks of Neuroscientists swelled who then had no place to go when the decade was over and the funding dried up. To this day you'll see guys on interstate off-ramps holding tattered signs reading Will do in-situ hybridization for food.
The Application Process
Naturally, the government wants to be reasonably certain they're going to get something in return for all this mad money, so the grant submission process is both unpleasant and byzantine. The R01 application packet (which anyone -- yes, you! -- can download) includes page upon page upon page of boiler-plate forms to fill out, listing your credentials, previous publications, previous funding and what the funders got for their money, a description of your facilities, your department's facilities, your university's facilities, proof that you've taken ethics training and won't lie, cheat, steal, rape, or kill, at least not while under government contract. There's telephone numbers and addresses and social security numbers and many things besides which I'm going to leave to your imagination so we can move on to the heart of the R01: the Research Plan. A detailed description of what, exactly, you are planning to do with the taxpayers' money. And I do mean detailed. Wouldn't it be cool if, like, I invented this thing? And it did stuff? isn't going to cut it.
Your Research Plan will describe your proposed project in sufficient detail that anyone reading it can picture in their mind's eye just what it is you will be doing from the time the alarm clock goes off at 4 AM to the time you go to bed at midnight every day of the funding period. It includes background information. It includes a description of the experiments. It includes a list of the apparatus. It includes pictures. It includes figures. It includes diagrams. It includes references. It includes what you bring to the table to get this done, and how the world is going to be changed once you do. And it includes data.
Previous data. Pilot data. Preliminary data. Postliminary data. Data, data, and more data.
The joke among faculty is that by the time you submit your R01, you've already done the research. What the government is really paying for is the next round of preliminary data. (I guess it's not really ha-ha funny. Whatever.)
Your Research Plan gets spell-checked and sent around to any colleagues you may be on speaking terms with and maybe some postdocs and grad students to see if it makes any sense. Then it's back to the lab for more data and then more rounds of spell- and sense-checking. Completing all this usually takes between six months and a year. On top of whatever else you're supposed to be doing, like teaching and grading and publishing and occasionally Skyping with your estranged family.
Once you are happy-with/sick-of your Research Plan, it goes into the rest of the application and then the process grinds to a halt for a week or two while you work with university bean counters to figure out how much all this is going to cost and come up with a budget. That gets added to the stack and you put a big staple through it, then a work-study walks the thing around campus to various university luminaries for their signatures for some reason. Then, after all is said and done and any final rituals are performed for luck (seriously: I've seen faculty do things to their completed grant application that I can only describe as unnatural) your baby is submitted to the funding agency, usually on-line, but occasionally in a FedEx box thick enough to stun a mule deer.
Now, all you can do is wait. And drink.
The submission and review process is shepherded by your Program Officer, an agency liaison who is there like a good neighbor to soothe your rattled nerves while an anonymous hate machine is deciding the fate of your grant and future. A trusted Svengali helping you through a difficult time, like that nice lunch lady who supplied you saltines and ginger ale when you kept blurping up your Lunchables the first week of junior high. People tell me their PO gives them regular status updates and helpful hints. The ones I've interacted with have been entrenched civil servants with a quick temper. Mythical unicorns who won't return your emails, and whose voicemail forwards to a call center in Mombasa. Maybe I just haven't figured out the right palms to grease.
Mostly what you do is wait. And drink.
Sometime after the submission deadline passes, the funding agency gathers all the grant applications it has received and calls forth names on its List of Experts, whom they put up in a Motel-6, usually somewhere in Anacostia, where the experts are expected to read and digest the grant pile they have been assigned while ducking small-arms fire. At the end of the week, everyone meets up on the Hill for cake and ice cream and with the Study Section thus called to order, a score is assigned to each grant (you can assume the scores go 0 (bad) to 100 (good) if you'd like -- the actual scores start at 1 and go to 9, with higher = bad. Don't ask.) Scores are ostensibly based on a discussion of the proposal's merit, although your score can get dinged if you happen to be banging the ex of someone on your Study Section. Or, you know, trying to get funding for the same thing they are.
Now comes the magical part.
The grants are sorted according to score and the Guys With The Money show up and go down the list starting at the top and fund grants one-by-one until the money is gone. The percentage of grants that gets funded is called the payline. If your grant was above the payline: happy day! A check from the government soon arrives at your university's Office of Contracts and Grants, who then skim off at least 50% (a practice called indirect costs -- a story for another time). Once they take their vig, OCG gives you an account number you can use to buy test tubes and snow tires and whatnot and get crackin' on the discoveries. (That's the abridged version. The reality is that OCG gives an account number to the Purchasing Department whom you must beg and beseech to acquire each whatnot because somewhere along the line the accountants all got together and decided university faculty are a bunch of feral children who can't be trusted with a government MasterCard and must have their every purchase professionally scrutinized. But I digress.)
On the other hand, if your grant was below the payline you get nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Kaspeggi. There are no consolation prizes in funding. No silver medals. No matter how many months you spent working on your proposal. It's haves and have-nots in academia, just like everywhere else in the demented nightmare America has become. Full disclosure: you are allowed to tweak your rejected proposal based on anonymous feedback from the Study Section and resubmit in six months. And then once more after that if need be. But if you don't make the payline in three attempts, you are literally out for good.
But the lucky ones are off to the races, attempting to transmute taxpayer money into research gold, or at least something you can put in your progress reports, which the government demands every few months during the funding period like you don't already have enough things to do.
Then before you know it, you get to start the process all over again. Forever. Because at most universities, if faculty don't keep bringing in grant money they are shown the door. These days even tenured faculty are getting thrown under the bus, as university lawyers find creative small print to exercise which undoes the job security we all thought tenure provided.
This brings us to our pop quiz.
For all of the blood, sweat, and tears faculty invest in their unpolished gem of an idea kicked from nurturing brain nest into the harsh climes of an NIH Study Section, how many grants -- what percent -- do you think get funded?
All of them, Katy? Or three-quarters? Probably at least half, no?
Guess again.
Historically the payline has hovered around 10%.
Ten percent. One in ten grant proposals gets funded. Or, to put it another way, nine out of ten grants DON'T get funded.
I add sofort that not all grant proposals should be funded. Nobody is calling for a 100% payline. Academics have ideas that are half-baked, submitted under deadline pressure, or just plain bad. But one-in-ten?? It feels like we should be able to do better than that. These are ideas from some of the smartest people on the planet, who have dedicated their lives to learning their craft. It is simply not possible that 90% of them are bozos. And they're not. The reason they don't get funded isn't because they're submitting bad ideas. The reason is because there's no money.
Let me translate that into the language of self-interest. Somewhere in the stack of grant proposals is an idea that might have helped you one day. Solved your problem, righted your wrong. Maybe it's a small problem, like your cell phone coverage sucks. Or maybe its a big problem, like the cancer or the heart disease that's going to try to kill you someday. Maybe it's not just your problem, but a problem for your family, friends, neighbors, or your community at-large.
That problem could have been a non-issue. We could have solved it. Defused it. Unmade it. But we're not gonna. The research proposal that would have generated the solution didn't get funded. Not because it was a bad idea, because it didn't make the payline. Because when your Congressman stood up and cut funding to the NIH, and the NSF, and NASA, and what all else, you stood up and cheered. And now you're dead. (Or you still have bad cell phone coverage.)
Sucks to be you, doesn't it?
Take Home Message
So the next time you talk or hear talk about how academics have it easy, or how they are spending tax money willy-nilly, or someone in a lab coat shows you data that upsets your worldview, remember they suffer through the labors described above. Today and every today that follows. And some today, what they do today might just save your bacon. If they're able to get funding, that is. Which isn't very many of them. So you might want to try being nicer to us.
And you, lucky one-in-ten grant-having-type person. Stop reading this and get back to work.
Someone has a problem that is waiting for your discovery.
Yet, for all of this bark bark, I'd bet the average citizen has no idea what's involved in getting the government to pony up grant money. Is it just a phone call? A secret handshake? How do eggheads get their paws on your hard-earned tax dollars?
Well LabKitty is here to help. Today, I break the academic's omertá to give you a glimpse inside the grant application sausage factory. Risking life and limb to bring this sordid tale to light, I am, although not really because, let's face it, most university faculty have little garter-snake arms that'll snap right off at the elbows. It's not like they're going to come after me. Still, I like to think of myself as the Erin Brockovich of research funding, albeit not quite so bosomy.
So if you ever wondered how the wheels of progress get greased, ever wanted a gander at the sweaty guys below decks shoveling coal and money into the great boilers of research, ever wanted to wander backstage at FundingPalooza, ever wondered how science turns adorable barnyard animals into tasty treats, then this one's for you.
Read on, citizen, and become better-informed.
Suppose you have an idea for a research and have found yourself in a position (read: most universities) where your chairman/dean/president expects you to petition the government for money that will pay for you turning your head music into actual real results that get published and feed the wheels of industry and progress. It turns out there are government entities such as the National Institutes of Health (henceforth: NIH) and the National Science Foundation (henceforth: NSF) who devote a substantial portion of their operating budget into helping university drones such as yourself transform dreams into reality. All that is required is to submit a grant proposal of the appropriate type to the appropriate agency when they announce they're accepting applications, which is usually twice a year.
Footnote: It goes without saying that first-rate research is done all over the world. But I only have experience with the U.S. funding machine, so I am only going to talk about the U.S. funding machine. Nosce te ipsum, and all that.
There's an entire acronym alphabet soup of different grant types, so to simplify things I here focus on that workhorse of university funding: the hallowed R01 (pronounced "arr-oh-one"). An R01 can put substantial coin into a researcher's purse, occasionally to the tune of several million dollars spread over 3-5 years. The NIH tends to be where the big money lives, more so than the NSF. Perhaps it's easier to convince Congress to open their hearts and wallets when your mission is beating back cancer and less so for beating the Swiss to the Higgs. In any event, I'm going to focus on NIH funding because I'm less familiar with the NSF.
The NIH is divvied up into various subagencies, which helps you decide where to send your proposal. So, for example, there's the National Cancer Institute (NCI) which funds cancer research and the National Eye Institute (NEI) which funds eye research and the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) which funds research on things like stroke and epilepsy. Occasionally, special cross-disciplinary funding programs are created, say when the First Lady gets a bug up her butt about something. These programs look good standing behind a podium, but the long-term effects are often disastrous. Famously, there was the NIH's "Decade of the Brain" which pumped a bunch of extra money into brain research awhile back. Predictably, the ranks of Neuroscientists swelled who then had no place to go when the decade was over and the funding dried up. To this day you'll see guys on interstate off-ramps holding tattered signs reading Will do in-situ hybridization for food.
The Application Process
Naturally, the government wants to be reasonably certain they're going to get something in return for all this mad money, so the grant submission process is both unpleasant and byzantine. The R01 application packet (which anyone -- yes, you! -- can download) includes page upon page upon page of boiler-plate forms to fill out, listing your credentials, previous publications, previous funding and what the funders got for their money, a description of your facilities, your department's facilities, your university's facilities, proof that you've taken ethics training and won't lie, cheat, steal, rape, or kill, at least not while under government contract. There's telephone numbers and addresses and social security numbers and many things besides which I'm going to leave to your imagination so we can move on to the heart of the R01: the Research Plan. A detailed description of what, exactly, you are planning to do with the taxpayers' money. And I do mean detailed. Wouldn't it be cool if, like, I invented this thing? And it did stuff? isn't going to cut it.
Your Research Plan will describe your proposed project in sufficient detail that anyone reading it can picture in their mind's eye just what it is you will be doing from the time the alarm clock goes off at 4 AM to the time you go to bed at midnight every day of the funding period. It includes background information. It includes a description of the experiments. It includes a list of the apparatus. It includes pictures. It includes figures. It includes diagrams. It includes references. It includes what you bring to the table to get this done, and how the world is going to be changed once you do. And it includes data.
Previous data. Pilot data. Preliminary data. Postliminary data. Data, data, and more data.
The joke among faculty is that by the time you submit your R01, you've already done the research. What the government is really paying for is the next round of preliminary data. (I guess it's not really ha-ha funny. Whatever.)
Your Research Plan gets spell-checked and sent around to any colleagues you may be on speaking terms with and maybe some postdocs and grad students to see if it makes any sense. Then it's back to the lab for more data and then more rounds of spell- and sense-checking. Completing all this usually takes between six months and a year. On top of whatever else you're supposed to be doing, like teaching and grading and publishing and occasionally Skyping with your estranged family.
Once you are happy-with/sick-of your Research Plan, it goes into the rest of the application and then the process grinds to a halt for a week or two while you work with university bean counters to figure out how much all this is going to cost and come up with a budget. That gets added to the stack and you put a big staple through it, then a work-study walks the thing around campus to various university luminaries for their signatures for some reason. Then, after all is said and done and any final rituals are performed for luck (seriously: I've seen faculty do things to their completed grant application that I can only describe as unnatural) your baby is submitted to the funding agency, usually on-line, but occasionally in a FedEx box thick enough to stun a mule deer.
Now, all you can do is wait. And drink.
The submission and review process is shepherded by your Program Officer, an agency liaison who is there like a good neighbor to soothe your rattled nerves while an anonymous hate machine is deciding the fate of your grant and future. A trusted Svengali helping you through a difficult time, like that nice lunch lady who supplied you saltines and ginger ale when you kept blurping up your Lunchables the first week of junior high. People tell me their PO gives them regular status updates and helpful hints. The ones I've interacted with have been entrenched civil servants with a quick temper. Mythical unicorns who won't return your emails, and whose voicemail forwards to a call center in Mombasa. Maybe I just haven't figured out the right palms to grease.
Mostly what you do is wait. And drink.
Sometime after the submission deadline passes, the funding agency gathers all the grant applications it has received and calls forth names on its List of Experts, whom they put up in a Motel-6, usually somewhere in Anacostia, where the experts are expected to read and digest the grant pile they have been assigned while ducking small-arms fire. At the end of the week, everyone meets up on the Hill for cake and ice cream and with the Study Section thus called to order, a score is assigned to each grant (you can assume the scores go 0 (bad) to 100 (good) if you'd like -- the actual scores start at 1 and go to 9, with higher = bad. Don't ask.) Scores are ostensibly based on a discussion of the proposal's merit, although your score can get dinged if you happen to be banging the ex of someone on your Study Section. Or, you know, trying to get funding for the same thing they are.
Now comes the magical part.
The grants are sorted according to score and the Guys With The Money show up and go down the list starting at the top and fund grants one-by-one until the money is gone. The percentage of grants that gets funded is called the payline. If your grant was above the payline: happy day! A check from the government soon arrives at your university's Office of Contracts and Grants, who then skim off at least 50% (a practice called indirect costs -- a story for another time). Once they take their vig, OCG gives you an account number you can use to buy test tubes and snow tires and whatnot and get crackin' on the discoveries. (That's the abridged version. The reality is that OCG gives an account number to the Purchasing Department whom you must beg and beseech to acquire each whatnot because somewhere along the line the accountants all got together and decided university faculty are a bunch of feral children who can't be trusted with a government MasterCard and must have their every purchase professionally scrutinized. But I digress.)
On the other hand, if your grant was below the payline you get nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Kaspeggi. There are no consolation prizes in funding. No silver medals. No matter how many months you spent working on your proposal. It's haves and have-nots in academia, just like everywhere else in the demented nightmare America has become. Full disclosure: you are allowed to tweak your rejected proposal based on anonymous feedback from the Study Section and resubmit in six months. And then once more after that if need be. But if you don't make the payline in three attempts, you are literally out for good.
But the lucky ones are off to the races, attempting to transmute taxpayer money into research gold, or at least something you can put in your progress reports, which the government demands every few months during the funding period like you don't already have enough things to do.
Then before you know it, you get to start the process all over again. Forever. Because at most universities, if faculty don't keep bringing in grant money they are shown the door. These days even tenured faculty are getting thrown under the bus, as university lawyers find creative small print to exercise which undoes the job security we all thought tenure provided.
This brings us to our pop quiz.
For all of the blood, sweat, and tears faculty invest in their unpolished gem of an idea kicked from nurturing brain nest into the harsh climes of an NIH Study Section, how many grants -- what percent -- do you think get funded?
All of them, Katy? Or three-quarters? Probably at least half, no?
Guess again.
Historically the payline has hovered around 10%.
Ten percent. One in ten grant proposals gets funded. Or, to put it another way, nine out of ten grants DON'T get funded.
I add sofort that not all grant proposals should be funded. Nobody is calling for a 100% payline. Academics have ideas that are half-baked, submitted under deadline pressure, or just plain bad. But one-in-ten?? It feels like we should be able to do better than that. These are ideas from some of the smartest people on the planet, who have dedicated their lives to learning their craft. It is simply not possible that 90% of them are bozos. And they're not. The reason they don't get funded isn't because they're submitting bad ideas. The reason is because there's no money.
Let me translate that into the language of self-interest. Somewhere in the stack of grant proposals is an idea that might have helped you one day. Solved your problem, righted your wrong. Maybe it's a small problem, like your cell phone coverage sucks. Or maybe its a big problem, like the cancer or the heart disease that's going to try to kill you someday. Maybe it's not just your problem, but a problem for your family, friends, neighbors, or your community at-large.
That problem could have been a non-issue. We could have solved it. Defused it. Unmade it. But we're not gonna. The research proposal that would have generated the solution didn't get funded. Not because it was a bad idea, because it didn't make the payline. Because when your Congressman stood up and cut funding to the NIH, and the NSF, and NASA, and what all else, you stood up and cheered. And now you're dead. (Or you still have bad cell phone coverage.)
Sucks to be you, doesn't it?
Take Home Message
So the next time you talk or hear talk about how academics have it easy, or how they are spending tax money willy-nilly, or someone in a lab coat shows you data that upsets your worldview, remember they suffer through the labors described above. Today and every today that follows. And some today, what they do today might just save your bacon. If they're able to get funding, that is. Which isn't very many of them. So you might want to try being nicer to us.
And you, lucky one-in-ten grant-having-type person. Stop reading this and get back to work.
Someone has a problem that is waiting for your discovery.
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