Think Like a Cockroach

Some young biologists might think that funding from the National Institutes of Health has never been harder to get than it is now, but those of us who have been around for a while can remember a period in the early 1990's when NIH funding seemed to all but disappear. I'm talking about 7% paylines at some institutions. I went through a period where I submitted 12 unsuccessful proposals in a row. Somehow I survived along with many of my colleagues, so excuse me if I don't quite feel yet that the apocalypse is upon us. At the time, however, many of us felt exactly that way. We called the dramatic drop in funding "the asteroid strike," in honor of the recently discovered impact site of the asteroid thought to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.