NIH policy on A2 as A0 that I didn’t really appreciate.

The NOT-OD-18-197 this week seeks to summarize policy on the submission of revised grant applications that has been spread across multiple prior notices. Part of this deals with the evolved compromise where applicants are only allowed to submit a single formal revision (the -xxA1 version) but are not prohibited from submitting a new (-01, aka another A0 version) one with identical content, Aims, etc.

Addendum A emphasizes rules for compliance with Requirements for New Applications. The first one is easy. You are not allowed an extra Introduction page. Sure. That is what distinguishes the A1, the extra sheet for replying.

After that it gets into the weeds. Honestly I would have thought this stuff all completely legal and might have tried using it, if the necessity ever came up.

The following content is NOT allowed anywhere in a New A0 Application or its associated components (e.g., the appendix, letters of support, other attachments):

Introduction page(s) to respond to critiques from a previous review
Mention of previous overall or criterion scores or percentile
Mention of comments made by previous reviewers
Mention of how the application or project has been modified since its last submission
Marks in the application to indicate where the application has been modified since its last submission
Progress Report

I think I might be most tempted to include prior review outcome? Not really sure and I’ve never done this to my recollection. Mention of prior comments? I mean I think I’ve seen this before in grants. maybe? Some sort of comment about prior review that did not mean the revision series.

Obviously you can accomplish most of this stuff within the letter of the law by not making explicit mention or marking of revision or of prior comments. You just address the criticisms and if necessary say something about “one might criticize this for…but we have proposed….”.

The Progress Report prohibition is a real head scratcher. The Progress Report is included as a formal requirement with a competing continuation (renewal in modern parlance) application. But it has to fit within the page limits, unlike either an Introduction or a List of Publications Resulting (also an obligation of renewals apps) which gets you extra pages.

But the vast majority of NIH R01s include a report on the progress made so far. This is what is known as Preliminary Data! In the 25 page days, I tended to put Preliminary Data in a subsection with a header. Many other applications that I reviewed did something similar. It might as well have been called the Progress Report. Now, I sort of spread Preliminary Data around the proposal but there is a degree to which the Significance and Innovation sections do more or less form a report on progress to date.

There are at least two scenarios where grant writing behavior that I’ve seen might run afoul of this rule.

There is a style of grant writer that loves to place the proposal in the context of their long, ongoing research program. “We discovered… so now we want to explore….”. or “Our lab focuses on the connectivity of the Physio-Whimple nucleus and so now we are going to examine…”. The point being that their style almost inevitably requires a narrative that is drawn from the lab as a whole rather than any specific prior interval of funding. But it still reads like a Progress Report.

The second scenario is a tactical one in which a PI is nearing the end of a project and chooses to continue work on the topic area with a new proposal rather than a renewal application. Maybe there is a really big jump in Aims. Maybe it hasn’t been productive on the previously proposed Aims. Maybe they just can’t trust the timing and surety of the NIH renewal proposal process and need to get a jump on the submission date. Given that this new proposal will have some connection to the ongoing work under a prior award, the PI may worry that the review panel will balk at overlap. Or at anticipated overlap because they might assume the PI will also be submitting a renewal application for that existing funding. In the old days you could get 2 or 3 R01 more or less on the same topic (dopamine and stimulant self-administration, anyone?) but I think review panels are unkeen on that these days. They are alert to signs of multiple awards on too-closely-related topics. IME anyway. So the PI might try to navigate the lack of overlap and/or assure the reviewers that there is not going to be a renewal of the other one in some sort of modestly subtle way. This could take the form of a Progress Report. “We made the following progress under our existing R01 but now it is too far from the original Aims and so we are proposing this as a new project..” is something I could totally imagine writing.

But as we know, what makes sense to me for NIH grant applications is entirely beside the point. The NOT clarifies the rules. Adhere to them.

“But you are doing fine, what are you complaining about?”

I’ve been seeing a few Twitter discussions that deal with a person wondering if their struggles in the academy are because of themselves (i.e., their personal merit/demerit axis) or because of their category (read: discrimination). This touches on the areas of established discrimination that we talk about around these parts, including recently the NIH grant fate of ESI applicants, women applicants and POC applicants.

In any of these cases, or the less grant-specific situations of adverse outcome in academia, it is impossible to determine on a case by case basis if the person is suffering from discrimination related to their category. I mean sure, if someone makes a very direct comment that they are marking down a specific manuscript, grant or recommendation only because the person is a woman, or of color or young then we can draw some conclusions. This never* happens. And we do all vary in our treatments/outcomes and in our merits that are intrinsic to ourselves. Sometimes outcomes are deserved, sometimes they vary by simple statistical chance and sometimes they are even better than deserved. So it is an unanswerable question, even if the chances are high that sometimes one is going to be treated poorly due to one’s membership in one of the categories against which discrimination has been proven.

These questions become something other than unanswerable when the person pondering them is doing “fine”.

“You are doing fine! Why would you complain about mistreatment, never mind wonder if it is some sort of discrimination you are suffering?”

I was also recently struck by a Tweeter comment about suffering a very current discrimination of some sort that came from a scientist who is by many measures “doing fine”.

Once, quite some time ago, I was on a seminar committee charged with selecting a year’s worth of speakers. We operated under a number of constraints, financial and topic-wise; I’m sure many of you have been on similar committees. I immediately noticed we weren’t selecting a gender balanced slate and started pushing explicitly for us to include more women. Everyone sort of ruefully agreed with me and admitted we need to do better. Including a nonzero number of female faculty on this panel, btw. We did try to do better. One of the people we invited one year was a not-super-senior person (one our supposed constraints was seniority) at the time with a less than huge reputation. We had her visit for seminar and it was good if perhaps not as broad as some of the ones from more-senior people. But it all seemed appropriate and fine. The post-seminar kvetching was instructive to me. Many folks liked it just fine but a few people complained about how it wasn’t up to snuff and we shouldn’t have invited her. I chalked it up to the lack of seniority, maybe a touch of sexism and let it go. I really didn’t even think twice about the fact that she’s also a person of color.

Many years later this woman is doing fine. Very well respected member of the field, with a strong history of contributions. Sustained funding track record. Trainee successes. A couple of job changes, society memberships, awards and whatnot that one might view as testimony to an establishment type of career. A person of substance.

This person went on to have the type of career and record of accomplishment that would have any casual outsider wondering how she could possibly complain about anything given that she’s done just fine and is doing just fine. Maybe even a little too fine, assuming she has critics of her science (which everyone does).

Well, clearly this person does complain, given the recent Twitt from her about some recent type of discrimination. She feels this discrimination. Should she? Is it really discrimination? After all, she’s doing fine.

Looping back up to the other conversations mentioned at the top, I’ll note that people bring this analysis into their self-doubt musings as well. A person who suffers some sort of adverse outcome might ask themselves why they are getting so angry. “Isn’t it me?”, they think, “Maybe I merited this outcome”. Why are they so angered about statistics or other established cases of discrimination against other women or POC? After all, they are doing fine.

And of course even more reliable than their internal dialog we hear the question from white men. Or whomever doesn’t happen to share the characteristics under discussion at the moment. There are going to be a lot of these folks that are of lesser status. Maybe they didn’t get that plum job at that plum university. Or had a more checkered funding history. Fewer highly productive collaborations, etc. They aren’t doing as “fine”. And so anyone who is doing better, and accomplishing more, clearly could not have ever suffered any discrimination personally. Even those people who admit that there is a bias against the class will look at this person who is doing fine and say “well, surely not you. You had a cushy ride and have nothing to complain about”.

I mused about the seminar anecdote because it is a fairly specific reminder to me that this person probably faced a lot of implicit discrimination through her career. Bias. Opposition. Neglect.

And this subtle antagonism surely did make it harder for her.

It surely did limit her accomplishments.

And now we have arrived. This is what is so hard to understand in these cases. Both in the self-reflection of self-doubt (imposter syndrome is a bear) and in the assessment of another person who is apparently doing fine.

They should be doing even better. Doing more, or doing what they have done more easily.

It took me a long while to really appreciate this**.

No matter how accomplished the woman or person of color might be at a given point of their career, they would have accomplished more if it were not for the headwind against which they always had to contend.

So no, they are not “doing fine”. And they do have a right to complain about discrimination.

__
*it does. but it is vanishingly rare in the context of all cases where someone might wonder if they were victim of some sort of discrimination.
**I think it is probably my thinking about how Generation X has been stifled in their careers relative to the generations above us that made this clearest to me. It’s not quite the same but it is related.