What are the most important questions and technologies that will hit your discipline within the next 10 years? Do you believe your NIH grant applications are aligned in the most appropriate study sections? Should grant reviewers serve as mentors to applicants? Last month, I sat down with Antonio Scarpa, director of the Center for Scientific Review, the gateway for all NIH grant applications, to discuss these and other questions. The occasion was the agency's final open house, during which biomedical researchers flew from all corners of the country to Bethesda, Maryland, to linkurl:talk about;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54034/ how they think NIH peer review should change. There was a lot of discussion and debate, but little resolution. "Nothing has been decided," linkurl:Scarpa;http://cms.csr.nih.gov/AboutCSR/Welcome+to+CSR/ noted. "Should the study section essentially tell how to do the experiment, helping write an application? If you do that, it could be a completely different mechanism," he said. Also, should the...
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