NIGMS score data: All about the approach. Still.

NIGMS blogger (oh, and yeah, the Director) Jeremy Berg has posted a very interesting set of data on the review of grants.
Director Berg examined the scoring for the 360 R01 applications assigned to his Institute for the October 2009 Council round. This, you will recall, was the first one to use the current scoring scheme . So in some senses this should be regarded as the baseline value.
The analysis Director Berg shows in the graph is the correlation between the “Significance” score and the Overall Impact Score. If you will recall, there has been a bit of grumbling on the part of reviewers and applicants alike about the weird disconnect of the new system.

Princeton what?

A post from Mike the Mad Biologist takes a shot at a recent post on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s site. Hackner and Dreifus pursue a thesis that Universities need to return to their roots, or “roots” I should say, and refocus on the education of undergraduate students. The part that got Mike the Mad….well, Mad, was this:

Spin off medical schools, research centers, and institutes. Postgraduate training has a place, as long as it doesn’t divert faculties from working with undergraduates or preoccupy presidents, who should be focusing on education–not angling for another center on antiterrorist technologies. For people who want to do research, plenty of other places exist–the Brookings Institution, the Rand Corporation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–all of which do excellent work without university ties. Princeton University has succeeded quite nicely without a medical school–which often becomes the most costly complex on a campus, commandeering resources, attention, and even mission. In fact, the “school” often becomes a minute part of a medical complex: Johns Hopkins has fewer than 500 medical students, but atop them sits an empire with more than 30,000 employees.