Gender smog in grant review

I noticed something really weird and totally unnecessary.

When you are asked to review grants for the NIH you are frequently sent a Word document review template that has the Five Criteria nicely outlined and a box for you to start writing your bullet points. At the header to each section it sometimes includes some of the wording about how you are supposed to approach each criterion.

A recent template I received says under Investigator that one is to describe how the

..investigator’s experience and qualifications make him particularly well-suited for his roles in the project?

Grrr.

Good problems

The problem with scientific meetings is that you get home all pumped up to write grants on four projects. #LifeofPI #allthescience

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) June 19, 2015

The Germain nonsense on fixing the NIH

I know you guys want to talk about this ridiculous commentary because the blog ephone has been ringing off the hook. Unfortunately I really don’t have the time for a proper post.

Discuss 

UPDATE: One thing I noticed about the proposal that merits a little more….specific discussion.

I believe the NIH should transition to a system that links getting a first job (faculty appointment) with sufficient funding to support a reasonably sized laboratory (three to five people, including the PI) in terms of staff salaries and supplies

Obviously there is a big range in terms of types of staff and the amounts that they are paid. However, I think we can start with the salaries of a 0 experience postdoc on NRSA scale ($42,840) and a 4 year postdoc (50,112). I am going to use $100,000 as the PI salary.

Benefits can range from 25% to 50% (again, as a rough approximation based on my limited experience with such numbers) which brings us to $241,190 or $289,428 per year for a three person laboratory. That is salary cost only. Obviously types of research vary tremendously but I have heard numbers in the range of 60% to 80% of research grant costs going to support staff salaries. Before we get into that, let’s raise the estimates to Germain’s upper bound of a lab of 5 individuals, the PI as above and two of each experience level postdocs ($357,380 and $428,856, depending on benefit rate).

With this estimate, if the staff cost is 80%, this brings us to the $357,380-$428,856 per year range. If staff cost is 60% of the research grant expenditure, then $595,633 – $714,760 range.

I invite you to compare these numbers, which Germain is recommending for 5-7 years starting presumably from Day 1, with the funding trajectories of yourself and your peers. At the upper bound, three modular R01s worth of funding for the entire duration of the pre-tenure interval.

This call is for a LOT fewer noob Assistant Professors being allowed to get in the game, by my calculation. Either that, a huge Congressional increase in the NIH budget or a massive retirement of those who are already in the game.

Note that I too would love to see that be possible. It would be fantastic if everyone could get three grants worth of funding to do whatever the heck they wanted, right from the start.

But in the real actual non-fantasy world, that would come with some serious constraints on who can be a scientist.

And I do not like people like Germain’s ideas on who those people should be.