On Consensus and Funding

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Time magazine, which featured several of the most prominent scientists of this century. One of the most prominent was, of course, Albert Einstein. Then later, I read the Opinion page by Nejat Düzgünes in the April 12 issue of The Scientist.1 The juxtaposition of these two articles got me thinking: What would have happened if Albert Einstein had been required to submit to a funding agency in Switzerland a grant proposal to study relativity but under the same requirements and documentation of funding agencies today? He wouldn't have stood a chance of being funded. Consider: He had no track record in the area he proposed to study. He had never studied it before. He had no or very few publications in the field. Everyone knows you have to have published in the field you intend to study to stand a chance of getting money. He had no laboratory and had no faculty appointment at a university. He was only a patent clerk, not a position that is very likely to impress the study section. He had no preliminary data--no data, no money. He had no one to put on his proposal as a consultant or co-principal investigator. He was proposing to study it all by himself. Ridiculous. The field he wanted to work on was outside the general areas of study of the physics faculty at colleges and universities at that time. No one is likely to fund such a wild idea as the interchangeability of mass and energy. He could not foresee any practical application of this project. What good is a project if it has no application to anything that anyone is doing? Why would any agency want to fund that kind of a project? Of course this is an absurd exercise in logic, but it does point up the situation that we all face today in trying to get funding. Granting agencies tend to fund research that furthers the narrow fields that are "in vogue" at the time, to quote Dr. Düzgünes, and anything outside that is looked upon as unfundable. But there is more to the granting agencies than the narrowness of view, or the other requirements that Dr. Einstein could not meet. For example, I once submitted a grant proposal to a federal agency to study the effects of nitric oxide on a particular virus. The grant was not funded, but one of the reviewers was quite honest, scientific, logical, and straightforward in his critique. None of his comments, however, were so rigorous that the proposal could not have been revised and resubmitted later and probably stood a good chance at funding. Unfortunately, the other reviewer was not as objective. From my reading of his review, he appeared to know very little about virology at all. His attitude was derogatory and even a little contemptuous. He appeared to be trying to cut down the proposal with a very limited knowledge of the subject. But the most insulting thing about the review was that he kept referring to "nitric acid," instead of "nitric oxide." He didn't have the faintest idea of what he was talking about. I got the very distinct impression that the second reviewer was basically a "hired gun," recruited for the main, if not only, purpose of making sure--for some unknown reason--that my grant proposal was not funded. I can accept the criticisms of the first reviewer, and I even learned a little bit from them, but was the ugliness of the second one necessary? Surely the agency could have found a second reviewer who knew more about virology. Is this what the funding agencies have come to? Should we have to put up with this type of trashy review of grant proposals? I don't think so. I most certainly will support any change in the grant process that does away with this type of anonymous stupidity. Roger Floyd, Ph.D. 6238 Rogers Park Place Cincinnati, OH 45213 N. Düzgünes, "Science by consensus: why the NIH grant review system must be changed," The Scientist, 13[8]:13, April 12, 1999.

On Consensus and Funding

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