Submitting a grant: is perfection too much to ask?

Does your grant have to be perfect to be funded?  @Drugmonkeyblog posted a thoughtful bunch of words that addresses this question, and a little back-and-forth on twitter was summarized by The Mistress of the Animals @pottytheron here.  I’m motivated to kill more electrons on the issue because honestly, DM and PT and I really I think agree on the important point, and I want the message to be clear:  submit your damn grant this cycle.

Silver?  Gold?  What the hell do these things mean?  @Pottytheron is spot on, there is no objective measure, only the inherently arbitrary opinions of study section.  We agree on the point that any grant submitted has a good chance of rejection for whatever reason.  And the *critical* part of academic success is to keep submitting.  Like shots on goal, you have to keep trying to win.

When I said, “silver proposals do not get fundable scores,” our apparent disagreement, I suggest, was the perception that I was referring to how “great” the science is.  Is this grant your “best” science?  I agree with DM, that question is not the most important one.  I super agree it’s not worth a grant cycle trying to improve the scientific concept of your grant.  We agree completely I think that too much time spent with tunnel vision on how brilliant your science is has diminishing returns.  What I mean by a “flawless” grant one that is holistic, that is, that treats each and every section (the budget, your biosketch, lay abstract, etc) with equal diligence.

A senior huge-ass deal PI told me once when I was a post-doc that grant proposals should be “round like a ball of wax,” and for years I could not figure out what the hell he meant.  I think his words though are key to understanding the paradox here– yes, I agree that a grant does not have to be perfect, and most importantly you should not spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make it so.  But at the same time, the grant must be large error-free.

Here is the rest of a post I had started earlier on the topic of writing a “perfect grant.”  What I point out are a few fatal flaws that have tanked grants of mine and those I’ve reviewed.

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Wait a minute, Smarty Pants…how can I, a not-quite-perfect person manage to put together a perfect grant proposal?  Damned if I know, to be honest.  But there were a few pitfalls I wanted to broadcast to perhaps prevent one of you from falling into similar holes.

Review the work of your admin.  At least two grants in my stack last week were painfully trashed because of the same mistake on their face page:  the mechanism was incorrectly filled out.  Specifically, two grant that were otherwise perfectly fine independent investigator grants had “career development” mechanism listed on their face page, clearly in error. The grants staff thought hard about whether it would be acceptable to correct this error for the PI.

Focus your grant on your strongest suit.  On the twitter, I made the comment that it was not a good idea to put in a grant on a topic that is not your strongest suit.  I was recently on study section where PIs got tepid scores, in part perhaps because their grant focus was different from their most recently published papers.  Odesseyblog in fact has an outstanding post describing his success in just such a subject matter switch.  Indeed has a super post on his mid-career research change.  Reading his post I think only underscores my point that such transitions should be undertaken with care.  OB says that he already had an extremely successful research enterprise in one area so sure.  If you already have stable grant funding for one project, and if you results are pouring in to suggest that you are mining a good data vein, then sure.  By all means, branch out.  (This is what the NIH intended the R21 mechanism to be for, in my understanding.)  The struggle I witnessed reviewing grants were PIs that were *not* yet firmly successful in one subject  area.  They came across as diffuse, unfocused.  If your main lab effort is *not* fully funded, your proposals, I suggest, should hit different facets of a singular focus, and not be shots into different areas completely, where you have no track record, hoping to get lucky.

Don’t bring coals to Newcastle.  No matter how brilliant you think your ideas are, be very very cautious about trying to “improve” a well-known area.  Specifically, I am referring in my experience to well-studied genes and molecular pathways.  As a junior investigator, I felt I had some great data on a well-studied gene, and felt that adding a “new angle” on an old pathway would be greeted with enthusiasm.  I was wrong.  This is a dicey one because new angles on old pathways *can* be huge breakthroughs, clearly.  My mistake was that as a small lab investigator, I thought that my moderate amount of interesting new data would be enough to pique the interest of those in the field.  In a well-established field/gene/pathway, novel aspects typically need to be accompanied by overwhelmingly strong data, preferably using a novel technology.  I overestimated the impact a few interesting experiments could have on jaded reviewers, and I’ve seen others do the same.  The bar for getting interest is much lower if you have a previously unknown, or under studied pathway.

Take a leap forward.  Success in an application can in the big scheme be viewed as a careful balance between innovation and feasibility.  It must be clear to reviewers that you are able to accomplish what you set out to do.  Publications are key.  Preliminary data, invaluable.  Yes, paradoxically, if your entire grant is completely feasible, then it risks being labeled “incremental,” a death sentence.  The best grants have a leap forward in there somewhere.  Reviewers want to see that if the grant is funded, the work will bring a quantum leap forward…not just tie up some lose ends.

Yes, most of these points are arguable.  These guidelines are successfully broken by senior scientists on a regular basis.  Careful though… like old F. Scott said, “Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.” The points above are directed at junior level investigators, and are delivered with the understanding that I am really only describing my personal experiences.  As “advice” take it with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism.   Nullius in verba, after all.

 

Reflections on loving small science in the cold room

Sorry for the delay, dear readers.  Lately, I’ve been feeling like Howard the Duck.  “Trapped in a world he never made!”  A brief chat with a colleague stirred up my ambivalent feelings about Big Science:  awe mixed with skepticism, and spurred this made me contemplative about my own start in lab…

Saw a colleague yesterday headed off to an NIH study section convened on some kind of crazy idea to sequence single neurons from all parts of the brain.  After a briefly swinging my…knowledge base…a little bit, shook my head at the idea, “Wow, you neuro guys are crazy ambitious!”  It made me think about the contrast between modern biomedical research, and the kind of science I fell in love with.

I’ve loved learning about science for as long as I can remember, but it first dawned on me that I liked life in the lab while a college student labeling Eppendorf tubes in a cold room on 168th street. Years earlier, my 6th grade teacher Mr. Petro-Roy let me take home some beat up astronomy books he was using as bases for a ball game. I’ll never forget what he said when he saw I was assigned to his class, “how did I get blessed with you?!”  Important encouragement for a poor kid with no confidence.  In 8th grade, my science teacher, Mr. Vreeland, would have the class packed up and ready to go out the door a few minutes before the bell every day, and somehow it became our ritual that I would try and stump him with a question.  I loved that.  He seemed to too.  About 10 years ago, I heard that Mr. Vreeland had died.  I get misty thinking about him.

As a college student, I sneered a little bit at professors that admitted they got poor grades in the subjects they were lecturing on.  With irony, I confess now I am one of those teachers.  When I got to college, I had gotten in to Wesleyan University by the skin of my teeth and was a January Freshman (my roommate, with a wicked grin, for years introduced me as such).   I took Genetics along with as many other classes as I could handle and was so stoked to be finally out of a mind-numbing job and a tense home situation.  I took too many courses, and tried to cut corners by taking the Genetics lecture without the drosophila lab portion, which was listed in the syllabus as optional.  The midterm was incomprehensible, and I confronted my professor during office hours.  He told me most of the questions I struggled with were taken directly from work done in the lab, and he was astonished that anyone in class was not also taking the lab.  I got a “C” and was devastated.  Around the same time, I went to the Science Library and tried to read journals with the word “genetics” in their title.  The technical jargon was impossible to understand and in no way resembled the science I thought I loved.  So I concluded after my first semester that I was not cut out for genetics and needed a new plan.

My best friend told me he always imagined I’d be a doctor, so I figured I’d try that.  I made spending money for college doing temporary clerical work and on fateful week I spent at the Muscular Dystrophy Association helping to unpack and sort grant applications.  The head of the office on a tour of the stacks of grants asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up…”Be a doctor, I think.”  Well, to get into medical school these days, you need some research background.  He picked up the phone and arranged an interview with William Johnson a doctor doing research in Tay Sachs disease.  His goofy energy was infectious…”what’s on the docket for today?” he would ask every morning.

In his small lab, I labeled tubes, I ran gels I barely understood.  The time flew by and for a change, I felt that I was playing a small part of a worthy, scrappy effort.  Once in medical school I realized that this is what I wanted to do with my life.

Grand projects are wonderful.  They are stimulus for the economy and they energize the public for the ambitions of science.  In my neck of the woods, The Human Genome Project has unquestionably been a boon to life science and biomedical research.  But it’s critically important that Big Science is funded over and beyond a stable budget for regular science.  If Big Science like BRAINI is going to be funded by stealing money from within the current NIH and NSF budgets, then I am violently opposed.

Younger scientists need protection from the ambitions of their elders.

The practical application of science to cure diseases for example is wonderful, but a cure for any disease would generate millions if not billions of dollars in profits in our current medical care system. IMHO if the research is “translational,” maybe it should be supported by staggering profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

Anyone interested in science, in working to fight a disease, to help other people and join a team of scrappy geeks, let’s pay it forward.  Certainly, I wouldn’t be where I am now without little selfless acts.