Updating the Glossary

I maintain a blog Glossary page which is supposed to be a handy reference for newcomers to the blog. It is necessary because I am lazy and often use shorthand when I am writing blog posts. My commenters frequently do as well. I was just adding RAP to the list when I thought I should maybe solicit feedback from you.

So, any suggestions for the Glossary, Dear Reader?

Anything which stumped you when you first started reading? Or which stumps you now?

What jargon should I add?

The NIH Cull and the K99/R00 cohorts

DataHound posted two key analyses on the state of the NIH-funded extramural work force. In the first one he presents the number of unique PIs from 1985-2014. It looks to me, roughly, that there are about 18% fewer PIs than the peak and approximately 10% fewer PIs if we ignore the ARRA interval.

Most of the real drop (i.e., not postARRA) occurred between FY2011 and FY2012 but there has been a downward trend from 2012 to 2014 so this looks to be the new reality.

The Cull is in full view now.

Has it seemed like grants are getting funded slightly more easily lately? If so, you can thank the Cull. (No doubt the pressure is more about applications than funded awards to unique PIs. But if the applications are seeing similar drops, this explains the feeling of relief, if you have it.)

The second post at DataHound presents several graphs on the K99/R00 awardees by original award year.

Transition to the R00 phase did not vary much up through the 2010 cohort and the cohorts are on the same trajectory, given the time function. Importantly the 2007-2009 cohorts follow the exact same trajectory, 2010 cohorts have a little bit of drop-off at the far end, due to less time since original award. Six years after the K99 award is the hard ceiling on transition to R00 in the first three cohorts and 2010 K99ers aren’t quite there yet.

Where the K99 awardee cohorts are not on the same trajectory is the transition to R01. DataHound’s plots show a clear plateau for the 2007-2010 cohorts. The 2007 awardees topped out at about 58% transitioning to R01 funding and subsequent cohort success rates are lower, year over year. Success in gaining an R01 for the 2009 cohort is about 70% that of the 2008 grouup and about half that of the 2007 cohort. The 2010 cohort is at least 20% less-successful than the 2009 K99 awardees.

It is pretty clear the Cull described in the first linked post is falling harder on the K99/R00 awardees than on the general pool of NIH-funded PIs. Depending on whether you take the ARRA high water mark for unique PIs or something lower that adheres to the normal trend, the Cull is only about a 10-20% as of FY2014.

This is BACKWARDS!

All this talk about getting more new scientists over the hump to faculty level career status. All this whinging and moaning about eating our seed corn. All the handwringing over ESIs.

And the program that is the crown jewel in doing something about transition is….not working.

If history is any guide, it would have taken official NIHdom about 15 years to “suddenly realize” this is the case and to try something new.

Thank goodness for DataHound. I anticipate he has accelerated this process by posting these two key analyses.

FIFA

Can someone explain why the U.S. is wasting a single penny going after corruption in futbol? Nobody gives a fig about soccer in this country. Let the UK or Germans or someone go after these people.

Meanwhile, we should be prosecuting the financial and banking greedholes who crashed the world economy.

Stupid CV Tricks: Is a job talk an invited seminar?

My esteemed colleague says no:

Lists job talks as invited presentations #CVredflag or, maybe this is a #CVpetpeeve

— Rick Bevins (he/him) (@RBevins) May 27, 2015

My view is that a job talk is more prestigious than a mere invited seminar due to the focal competition and review.

So sure, put those down in the same CV category as non-job-talk seminar invitations.

Introductions

The Introduction section of research articles should evolve with a maturing field.

In the early going, every new lab that jumps into an emerging sub-sub-field of investigation tends to review the same arguments from a limited set of evidence. As time elapses, review articles are written and the body of prior work pretty much covers the bases.

So Intros should become shorter and simply reference that prior material.

Particularly when the current work is as much motivated by ongoing findings as it is by the original problem or question which motivated the original sub-sub-field. 

This can be a problem for latecomers who want to showcase all of the beautiful justification and background that they have been writing up. This is especially problematic for graduate students who have been writing at dissertation length and are loathe to kill-their-babies (as the real writers say).

It is generally problematic for trainees because they have so few of their sentences, paragraphs and pages published at this point of their career.

As a reviewer I try as best I can to be tolerant to these issues. You can generally tell when a long Intro section comes from dissertation writing so I try to be kind. 

Likewise, even though I lean for a substantial Intro myself, if someone wrote sparely with clear reference to the motivating literature, well I try to resist demanding comprehensive background. 

I had a recent review of one of our manuscripts which demanded repetition of what is now a substantial body of Introductory material across many, many papers. The two semi-district tracks of prior research we are bringing together each have enough papers and reviews to make all the points clear. I had thought that in fact we were risking someone telling us to cut a paragraph off of our Introdiction, frankly. 

That’s the great thing about peer review, I suppose.

You get all kinds.

Thought on the Ginther report on NIH funding disparity

I had a thought about Ginther just after hearing a radio piece on the Asian-Americans that are suing Harvard over entrance discrimination.

The charge is that Asian-American students need to have better grades and scores  than white students to receive an admissions bid.

The discussion of the Ginther study revolved around the finding that African-American applicant PIs were less likely than PIs of other groups to receive NIH grant funding. This is because Asian-Americans, for example, did as well as white PIs. Our default stance, I assume, is that being a white PI is the best that it gets. So if another group does as well, this is evidence of a lack of bias.

But what if Asian-American PIs submit higher quality applications as a group?

How would we ever know if there was discrimination against them in NIH grant award?

Thoughts on NIH grant strategy from Associate Professor H. Solo

We spend a fair amount of time talking about grant strategy on this blog. Presumably, this is a reflection of an internal process many of us go through trying to decide how to distribute our grant writing effort so as to maximize our chances of getting funded. After all we have better things to do than to write grants.

So we scrutinize success rates for various ICs, various mechanisms, FOAs, etc as best we are able. We flog RePORTER for evidence of which study sections will be most sympathetic to our proposals and how to cast our applications so as to be attractive. We worry about how to construct our Biosketch and who to include as consultants or collaborators. We obsess over how much preliminary data is enough (and too much*).

This is all well and good and maybe, maybe….perhaps….it helps.

But at some level, you have to follow your gut, too. Even when the odds seem overwhelmingly bad, there are going to be times when dang it, you just feel like this is the right thing to do.

Submitting an R01 on very thin preliminary data because it just doesn’t work as an R21 perhaps.

Proposing an R03 scope project even if the relevant study section has only one** of them funded on the RePORTER books.

Submitting your proposal when the PO who will likely be handling it has already told you she hates your Aims***.

Revising that application that has been triaged twice**** and sending it back in as a A2asA0 proposal.

I would just advise that you take a balanced approach. Make your riskier attempts, sure, but balance those with some less risky applications too.

I view it as….experimenting.

__
*Just got a question about presenting too much preliminary data the other day.

**of course you want to make sure there is not a structural issue at work, such as the section stopped reviewing this mechanism two years ago.

***1-2%ile scores have a way of softening the stony cold heart of a Program Officer. Within-payline skips are very, very rare beasts.

****one of my least strategic behaviors may be in revising grants that have been triaged. Not sure I’ve ever had one funded after initial triage and yet I persist. Less so now than I used to but…..I have a tendency. Hard headed and stupid, maybe.

NIH Program Officers do not understand what happens during review

It is one of the most perplexing things of my career and I still don’t completely understand why this is the case. But it is important for PIs, especially those who have not yet experienced study section, to understand a simple fact of life.

The NIH Program Officers do not completely understand what contributes to the review and scoring of your grant application.

My examples are legion and I have mentioned some of them in prior blog posts over the years.

The recent advice from NIAID on how to get your grant to fit within a modular budget limit.

The advice from a PO that PIs (such as myself) just needed to “write better grants” when I was already through a stint on study section and had read many, many crappy and yet funded grants from more established investigators.

The observation that transitioning investigators “shouldn’t take that job” because it was soft money and K grants were figuring heavily in the person’s transition/launch plans.

Apparently honest wonder that reviewers do not read their precious Program Announcements and automatically award excellent scores to applications just because they align with the goals of the PA.

Ignorance of the revision queuing that was particularly endemic during the early part of my career (and pretend? ignorance that limiting applications to one revision round made no functional difference in this).

The “sudden discovery” that all of the New Investigator grants during the checkbox era were going to well-established investigators who simply happened not to have NIH funding before, instead of boosting the young / recently appointed investigators.

An almost comically naive belief that study section outcome for grants really is an unbiased reflection of grant merit.

I could go on.

The reason this is so perplexing to me is that this is their job. POs [eta: used to] sit in on study section meetings or listen in on the phone. At least three times a year but probably more often given various special emphasis panels and the assignment of grants that might be reviewed in any of several study sections. They even take notes and are supposed to give feedback to the applicant with respect to the tenor of the discussion. They read any and all summary statements that they care to. They read (or can read) a nearly dizzying array of successful and unsuccessful applications.

And yet they mostly seem so ignorant of dynamics that were apparent to me after one, two or at the most three study section meetings.

It is weird.

The takeaway message for less NIH-experienced applicants is that the PO doesn’t know everything. I’m not saying they are never helpful….they are. Occasionally very helpful. Difference between funded and not-funded helpful. So I fully endorse the usual advice to talk to your POs early and often.

Do not take the PO word for gospel, however. Take it under advisement and integrate it with all of your other sources of information to try to decide how to advance your funding strategy.

Crystal clear grant advice from NIAID

from this Advice Corner on modular budgeting:

As you design your research proposal, tabulate a rough cost estimate. If you are above but near the $250,000 annual direct cost threshold, consider ways to lessen your expenses. Maybe you have a low-priority Specific Aim that can be dropped or a piece of equipment you could rent rather than buy new.

H/t: PhysioProf

Related Reading:

NIAID
Sample Grants

Fighting with the New Biosketch format

I have been flailing around, of and on for a few months, trying to write my Biosketch into the new format [Word doc Instructions and Sample].

 

I am not someone who likes to prance around bragging about “discoveries” and unique contributions and how my lab’s work is I am so awesomely unique because, let’s face it, I don’t do that kind of work. I am much more of a work-a-day type of scientist who likes to demonstrate stuff that has never been shown before. I like to answer what are seemingly obvious questions for which there should be lots of literature but then it turns out that there is not. I like to work on what interests me about the world and I am mostly uninterested in what some gang of screechy monkey GlamourHumpers think is the latest and greatest.

Ahem.

This is getting in the way of my ability to:

Briefly describe up to five of your most significant contributions to science. For each contribution, indicate the historical background that frames the scientific problem; the central finding(s); the influence of the finding(s) on the progress of science or the application of those finding(s) to health or technology; and your specific role in the described work.

Now interestingly, it was someone who works in a way most unlike the way I do that showed me the light. Actually, he gave me the courage to think about ignoring this supposed charge in the sample / instruction document. This person recommended just writing a brief sentence or two about the area of work without trying to contextualize the importance or significance of the “contribution”. I believe I actually saw one of the five permitted subheadings on his version that was more or less “And here’s some other stuff we work on that wasn’t easily categorized with the rest of it.”

I am at least starting from this minimalist standpoint. I don’t know if I will have the courage to actually submit it like this, but I’m leaning towards doing so.

I have been hearing from quite a number of you that you are struggling with creating this new version of the NIH Biosketch. So I thought I’d open it up to comment and observation. Anyone have any brilliant solutions / approaches to recommend?

UPDATE:
One of the things that has been bothering me most about this is that it takes the focus off of your work that is specific to the particular application in question. In the most recent version of the Biosketch, you selected 15 pubs that were most directly relevant to the topic at hand. These may not be your “most significant contributions” but they are the ones that are most significant for the newly proposed studies.

If one is now to list “your most significant contributions”, well, presumably some of these may not have much to do with the current application. And if you take the five sections seriously, it is hard to parse the subset of your work that is relevant to one focal R01 sized project into multiple headings and still show now those particular aspects are a significant contribution.

I still think it is ridiculous that they didn’t simply make this an optional way to do the Biosketch so as to accommodate those people that needed to talk about non-published scholarly works.

Thought of the day

The science has been getting better and better in my group lately. Progress on most fronts and I’m pretty stoked for what is going on.
I think I am getting increasingly grumpy with Internet dumbassery at the same time.
Which I find very strange.

The Capstone (Emeritus) Award is Already in Pending Legislation

In case you weren’t already cynical enough about NIH’s trial balloon at Rockey’s Blog and the ensuing RFI (link to the comments is posted at DataHound), now the DataHound casually notes something really scary predictable.

As a further update, as first pointed out to me by @ChrisPickett5, the latest draft of the 21st Century Cures Act currently being developed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee includes a section about a “Capstone Award” (pg. 26-27).  

Which says, in the current version of the Act:

‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary may make awards
3 (each of which, hereafter in this section, referred to as
4 a ‘Capstone Award’) to support outstanding scientists who
5 have been funded by the National Institutes of Health.
6 ‘‘(b) PURPOSE.—Capstone Awards shall be made to
7 facilitate the successful transition or conclusion of re

8search programs, or for other purposes, as determined by
9 the Director of NIH, in consultation with the directors
10 of the national research institutes and national centers.
11 ‘‘(c) DURATION AND AMOUNT.—The duration and
12 amount of each Capstone Award shall be determined by
13 the Director of NIH in consultation with the directors of
14 the national research institutes and national centers.
15 ‘‘(d) LIMITATION.—Individuals who have received a
16 Capstone Award shall not be eligible to have principle in

017vestigator status on subsequent awards from the National
18 Institutes of Health.’’.

Which, should this pass, totally makes the Emeritus award a done deal despite the many critical comments offered on Rockey’s blog and in the RFI responses.

Reading between the lines here it appears that what NIH specifically needed Congress to approve* was the LIMITATION part, i.e., the authority to prevent Capstone Awardees from serving on any subsequent grants as principle [sic] investigator.

I guarantee you that this was not some Congress Critter coming up with this idea out of thin air. The NIH, meaning with the full involvement of Francis Collins, asked for this. Which means they are steaming right ahead, absolutely regardless of any responses they got on the RFI.

 

I’m sure they will trot out some Executive Summary of the responses that is unduly heavy on the “pro” responses and dismissive of the “con” responses. Just you watch.

 

Thanks to the DataHound’s FOIA request, we’ll all be able to watch their pre-established agenda perfidy in action.

 

Pop your corn, folks, pop your corn.

 

__

*This is evidence of exactly what I mean when I express dismissal of any NIH excuses that they are not authorized to make some change or other. It is as simple as them going to their favorite Congress Critter and getting whatever they want inserted into the next handy bill. So when NIH says “we don’t have the authority” the proper interpretation is to hear it as “we don’t really want to do that”.

 

Responses to the NIH RFI on the Emeritus award proposal

Datahound posted the comments he received on Google docs. Go read.

Comment over on DataHound.

More on citation scofflaws

So.

What if you have a habitual offender in your field?

Someone who simply refuses to cite and discuss relevant literature from ten different labs. It isn’t personal animus against a single lab at this point. 

Do you take it out on them in your own papers? Reviews? Or just keep giving them harsh reviews? Do you talk to their occasional co-authors that you know well off the record? 

Citation Curmudgeonry