The National Institutes of Health announced today that the grant submission process will be changed so that grant applications are allowed only a single chance to revise and re-submit, instead of the typical two chances that applications used to receive. Â The agency cites the change as being necessary because 17% of first submissions were funded in 2002, compared with only 7% in 2006. Â This just doesn’t make any sense to me. Â The number of funded applications on the first submission has gone down because of what effectively amounts to cuts in the NIH budget (i.e. the budget has not kept pace with the biomedical inflation rate). Â So now, the solution is to give scientists FEWER chances to get their research funded with the same, shrinking pool of money. Â Yeah, that’s going to go over REALLY well.
On the plus side of things, I scored free coffee from Waggy’s today. Â W00t!