Funding Briefs

A Noble Gesture Toward Plant Biology The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, long active in medical research and agriculture, is taking bids on building a laboratory and recruiting staff for a new division of plant biology. By September of this year, the foundation hopes to have a core of 20 of its own researchers, which will expand to 40 in the next four or five years. The division will fund in-house research as well as supporting labs at other institutions. Plant biologist Richard Dixon arrived in the spring to head the division. He left the University of London to go to the foundation’s headquarters in Ardmore, Oklahoma, because “nowhere in the U.K. do you get to hire 40 people to do the research you want with no strings attached except to produce good science.” Big Noise About Small Print The latest edition of NIH’s guidelines for proposals includes a new requirement: The type in proposals should contain no more than 15 characters per inch. It’s the latest development in a two-year tussle between NIH and authors of complex proposals. When the agency limited the research plan to 20 pages, some investigators felt they couldn’t tell their story adequately in so few words. So researchers turned to stunt typography: shrinking the type size, the space between lines, even the space between words, until the manuscript squeezed into the allotted page limit. But the NIH Division of Research Grants says that such tiny type puts an unfair burden on reviewers. From now on, proposals with outlaw typography will be returned unread and NIH may choose to make the investigator wait until the next funding cycle to resubmit a legible proposal. Birth Of A Biotech Philanthropy By fall of this year, roughly a million dollars in research grants will be available from the biotechnology industry’s first homegrown philanthropic institution, the newly formed Genentech Foundation in South San Francisco. The foundation has its roots in a long-standing patent request. Back in the late 1970s, Genentech had applied for a patent on Itakura and Rigg’s basic process for manipulating proteins. The government, taking time to develop the staff to evaluate biotechnology patent applications and to make a little progress with the backlog, granted the patent last November. Genentech decided to price the licensing moderately—0.5% of profits the first year, and 1% thereafter—and use the proceeds to create a charitable foundation for biotechnology research. For the first four years, Genentech will guarantee that the foundation receives at least $1 million to distribute. The company hopes to finish selecting the foundation’s board of directors and writing guidelines for proposals by September. Scientists interested in applying for research grants can add their names to the mailing list by calling 415-266-1000. Wanted: Volunteer Red-Tape Cutters! A group of federal funding agencies, including NIH and NSF, have come up with a streamlined way of administering grants and are calling for volunteers to test it. It used to be that if an investigator wanted to spend grant money on, say, a DNA sequencer, then the agency giving the grant money had to agree first. The new system eliminates the need for this prior approval—a school administrator’s go-ahead will do. The administrator will also be allowed to authorize an investigator to switch funds from one budget category to another. Universities will be able to incur costs on a project up to 90 days before the grant officially begins, and to carry over extra funds for up to 12 months. The funding agency will review the transactions at the end of the grant period. About 30 universities across the country will be selected for the experiment in red-tape cutting and could be operating under the new rules by the end of September. Interested? Contact NIH or NSF headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Funding Briefs

The Scientist Staff

A Noble Gesture Toward Plant Biology

Big Noise About Small Print

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