- Machiavelli's Laboratory is a free ebook that I published on April 13, 2010. It is a satiric discourse on scientific ethics, from the perspective of an unethical scientist. Please don't take any of the advice and opinions in the book (or the excerpts featured in this blog) seriously.
The typical grant reviewer gives your grant a perfunctory once-over, looking for answers to the following simplistic questions:
1. Is the applicant a bona fide scientist? This often boils down to whether the reviewer knows the applicant or knows any of the people who the applicant has worked with, past or present. If the applicant is a complete unknown to the reviewer, it is unlikely that his application will be taken seriously by the reviewer.
2. Does the applicant have a history of completing the grant awards that he has received? If the members of the study section learn that you botched a prior grant, it's an uphill battle to get another chance of funding. One of the best ways of unloading a failing grant is to relocate to a new institution. Many grants are tied to a set of resources that are unique to the host institution. When the principal investigator leaves, the grant stays in the institution. When this happens, the principal investigator is relieved from his obligation to fulfill the grant. The home institution continues to draw down its indirect costs for the grant (i.e., the part of the grant funding that pays for the administrative and physical overhead of supporting the grant), but the incentive to follow the grant's research plan has vanished. In these cases almost everyone wins. The principal investigator has moved on to another job; he can list his severed grant as proof of his fundability, and he can apply for another grant without being held accountable for the failure of his research project. The original host institution continues to collect indirect costs for the duration of the grant. Some lucky researcher in the host institution will be assigned as the new principal investigator for the grant, and this is equivalent to winning a grant, without bothering to compete in the grant application pool. In the case of NIH grants, the only loser is the American taxpayer, who is saddled with paying for a non-productive grant, for the duration of the funding period.
3. Does the applicant have a friend on the study section? Applicants with little or no name recognition in the scientific community can redeem their credibility if they have a champion among their study section. A convivial member of a study section can exert great influence by discussing significant prior contributions from the applicant, and by prophesying the applicant's future productivity. Study section members are asked not to promote the efforts of applicants from their own institutions, but a shrewd study section member often looks for friends who live beyond his own back yard. In winter, a study section member who lives in Wisconsin, might dream of working in San Diego. An evil scientist never misses an opportunity to solidify friendships with influential academics from a desirable location. Exercising his powers of persuasion, he can push the score of a mediocre grant into the "funding" range. Once accomplished, how does the evil scientist take credit for his act? There is no effective way to maintain the confidentiality of study section discussions. It is commonplace for study section members, during their refreshment breaks, to get on their phones and spread the news. The evil scientist will place a call to the applicant, or to a close friend of the successful applicant, relating the thrilling tale of how he saved the grant, just as it was headed for oblivion.
4. Is the grant well written? Most grant applicants do not understand that a grant application is a work of literature, not a technical report. It's not sufficient to provide a correct but perfunctory response to the headings included in the template provided by the funding agency. Like all works of literature, your grant application must provide compelling reasons to read the first sentence, then the next sentence, and so on, until the grant is finished. The biggest mistake that most grant applicants make is to wait until the last possible moment to write the grant. Although it is possible to write a grant application at the last possible moment, it is impossible to re-write a grant application that was written at the last possible moment. Persuasive grants are written, then re-written, and re-written again, until the applicant is satisfied that the goals of the grant will become the goals of the reviewer. A thoughtfully crafted grant proposal is such a rare commodity that it will be likely receive a fundable score, on the basis of literary merit alone.
5. Does the grant address an important scientific problem, that has not been previously solved? This seems obvious, but many grant applications cannot meet this simple condition. A few bad grant applications address problems that have already been solved. More commonly, a grant application will address a problem that has not been solved previously, but which has no scientific importance (i.e., not much reason to solve the problem in the first place). Applicants must unburden themselves of the popular but misguided notion that all unsolved problems have potential merit. The burden of uncovering the merit in a research problem falls on the applicant. He must somehow persuade the study section that a problem that nobody has bothered to solve, throughout human history, is more worthy of funding than the projects offered by his competitors.
6. Does the grant application make any scientific sense? The "sense" of a research project is determined by the scientific paradigm that spawned the central hypothesis. For example, if you believe that there are four essences to the universe (i.e., earth, air, fire, and water), then you might find a project, that measures the power of water to overcome the power of fire, to be rather sensible. If you believe that aliens from other planets walk among us, you might want to fund a registry database that tracks the whereabouts of illegal extraterrestrials. Here's another example. In 2003, NCI set a goal of eliminating death from cancer by the year 2015 (1). In the ensuing years, NCI has not pushed back the expected delivery date. If you believe that cancer will be conquered by the year 2015, then it would make no sense to apply for a cancer research grant that extends into the year 2016 (after cancer has already been cured). For that matter, it would make no sense to fund NCI research grants awarded in the year 2011 with five years of funding; four will suffice. It's best to pander to the biases that prevail in the committee. If your reviewers believe in global warming, and that the oceans will rise 18 inches in the next decade, then you must believe the same. If they don't believe in global warming, then neither should you.
7. Is the grant budget realistic? Don't be cheap. If your grant budget is too small for the work proposed, the review committee will conclude that you don't know what you're doing (which you don't). If it's too large, they'll think the grant is simply a revenue-generating scheme (which it is). What is the correct amount of money to request for your grant? Nobody knows. If you think about it, you'll realize that it is impossible to predict the costs of research; nobody knows what techniques will work before they've actually worked. The best you can do is to plagiarize your budget with the budget of a successfully funded grant from your own institution.
Evil scientists should take note that honesty is not a criteria for grant success. It makes no sense to write a grant proposal that faithfully describes your intended research. The review committee will be composed by your competitors, who will give your grant a low score, and steal your ideas. Under these circumstances, honesty is the worst policy. Feel free to write ridiculous, misleading proposals; even if your grant if rejected, at least you'll have the satisfaction of leading your competitors astray.
Study section members are not endowed with the ability to peer into the future. They cannot determine which grants will yield major advances, and which grants will contribute nothing to science or society. The only thing that a study section member can do is to judge whether the grant meets the general criteria for a well-constructed grant (vida supra). Very few grant applications meet these criteria. Hence, very few grant applications deserve funding. Nonetheless, the available funds will be distributed to thousands of applicants. A Committee of Science and Public Policy report concluded that if you were to switch the review group for a set of grant applications, you would change the group of funded investigators by 25-30% (2). Agencies would save a great deal of money if they pooled the adequately written grants, and awarded funds by lottery. Deep down, everyone knows this.
REFERENCES
[1] Eschenbach AC. NCI sets goal of eliminating suffering and death due to cancer by 2015. Journal of the National Medical Association 95:637-639, 2003.
[2] Garfield E. Essays of an Information Scientist. Current Contents 5:3, Feb. 2, 1987.
- © 2011 Jules Berman
