The Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel
Mackay, Richards et al., Nature
North Carolina State University's Trudy Mackay and her colleagues present the Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel, "a community resource for analysis of population genomics and quantitative traits."
It's a Mountain of Grant Applications
June 09, 2009
Approximately 20,000 Challenge Grant applications were submitted, says NIH. All those applicants should expect their summary statements with critiques and criterion score from three reviewers by August. According to NIH, more than 18,000 researchers will participate in the peer review process for the Challenge Grants. These numbers, however, are a source of concern for the director of NIH's Center for Scientific Review, Antonio Scarpa, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. He says that for each application, the reviewers work about 12 hours each and that as many as 99 percent of the applications will be denied — and they may be resubmitted later. "This is not sustainable," Scarpa says.
Agreed. High-throughput
Agreed.
High-throughput sequencing and analysis is a good thing; high-throughput proposal development and processing isn't.
Could the Obama
Could the Obama administration and NIH have handled this more poorly? If it takes 50 hours to write and 36 hours to review each grant application, then the scientific community will have invested 1.7 million hours of work to create a program funding less than 1% of the applications that will eventually distribute a stimulus of about 65 cents per American resident. Couldn't they, instead, have just moved the funding line a few percent lower for programs that are already working? After all, the number of grants that will be funded as RC1 is only about 0.007 of the number of grants NIH is currently funding.