Twelve Months of DrugMonkey (2025)

I was paging back through the months and…wow did I have a lot to blog about this year.

January: More advance compliance with anti-diversity forces from the NIH I had no idea how bad it was going to get but sure enough, we found out that advance compliance did not head off the assault on NIH.

February: Every Person for Themselves I already got modest resistance responses to the merest suggestion that maybe those with funding could try to help those who had their funding pulled because of running afoul of the regime’s attacks on “DEI”.

March: CSR study section chaos: Making note of the memory hole As the assault on NIH continued, I tried to figure out if cancelled study sections would be rescheduled.

April: The moral injury of participating in a repressive system Does serving on a NIH study section entail moral injury to the participants?

May: The NIH can award all the grants before September 30th I am unimpressed with panicky suggestions that NIH literally cannot catch up to their usual number of grants awarded in the FY.

June: The alleged profession strikes again Another month, another annoyance from journalism. N=1 sourcing on fathers in academia who try to be an equal partner. Yeah, that will be a balanced and accurate portrayal…

July: Where are the T32s? Getting nervous about T32s as the chaos at NIH continues.

August: NIH may block NOSI for all but emergency purposes NIH announces they are doing away with Notices of Special Interest except in urgent circumstances.

September: One month to go for NIH grants in the FY2025 cycle “Another way to look at this is that we’re currently missing 1,809 new R01s.”

October: No rest for the… virtuous Do you think NIH ICs have learned their lessons and will be chomping at the bit to fund grants in December?

November: Notes on NIH matters as the government opens up again Talking about study sections in the wake of the long government shutdown.

December: NYT article claims multi-year awards are all reduced in length and budget…huh? In which I discover I missed something very important about the multi-year funding scheme.

Important Font News!

As you know, Dear Reader, there are more NIH grants that fund when written in Arial font than any other font. Some crazed font nerds around here assert that Georgia font is the way to go, as it is easy to read. Either way, it is clearly vitally important to select the right font if you expect to have your grant funded.

Somewhere circa 2017 NIH went nuts and pretty much allowed any font that met some basic size and spacing requirements. Whatever.

In these times of assault on the NIH, I fear I must alert you to a new font issue.

Some fonts are woke!

And we know what happens to grant proposals that are too woke.

So no more Calibri font, folks.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has directed the State Department to go back to using Times New Roman typeface as the standard for official papers, a spokesperson told CNN, in a reversal of the previous administration’s update to the sans-serif Calibri.

Why, you may be asking yourself?

to “restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program.”

Sorry. What DEIA program exactly?

Calibri is a sans serif typeface, meaning it’s a cleaner font without any extra lines attached to the letters compared to Times New Roman. This can make it easier to read for people with dyslexia or vision problems, some experts say.

Good god. It is now “wasteful DEIA” to make your text as readable as possible for anyone who might come across it.