Officials of the National Institutes of Health are actively seeking ideas for how to spend increasing funds. Afraid that they will have too little in the way of spectacular results to show for spectacular funding increases, they are throwing money at genomewide projects designed to accumulate reams of data while not increasing the number of individual investigator-initiated projects, at least not at anything like the same rate.
So on the one hand we have an embarrassment of riches, while on the other we have people who leave science for want of a small amount of initial funding. To complicate the picture further, genomics is changing the scale of funding that investigators need. Driven by genomic discoveries and the cultural change they are creating, biology is becoming Big Science. To do front-line biology research increasingly requires access to expensive technology such as cDNA microarray facilities, mass spectrometry, mouse genetics, and so ...
