Making Grants Go Further:
The Perils of Industrialization
The NIH grant funding system is in distress. The success rate for nonamended applications was less than 10% in 2005,
Although the NIH has introduced a new structure for review committees and some pilot changes, success rates have not improved. This crisis cannot be solved by tinkering with peer review, whose many problems I delineated in these pages eight years ago. 2 At the time, the NIH stated that it was seriously addressing these issues by emphasizing innovation, expediting the funding of recently reviewed grants, and improving study sections in its "Boundaries" process. Such minor changes have not improved the funding of biomedical research, and I therefore challenge the NIH to completely shift its ...
