Have you ever been told you couldn’t get funding because you weren’t asking for enough of it? Sounds absurd, right? That’s how Richard J. Roberts of New England Biolabs in Massachusetts felt when he heard over and over from funding agencies that they simply didn’t have a mechanism to provide him with the series of small grants he was asking for—each $5,000 to $10,000 to annotate microbial genes of unknown function. He was hoping to provide the modest funds to labs that could quickly and cheaply annotate a wide range of genes. But the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, even the US Department of Energy all said the same thing—they couldn’t support such a project “because the amounts of money were smaller than they were used to dealing with,” Roberts recalls.
“I thought it was stupid [and] ridiculous,” he says. “To say, ‘That’s a good idea, ...
