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.