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."
Tips for Successful Grants
September 01, 2010
Morgan at the The Scientist's Naturally Selected blog has some tips for successful grant applications. Getting a grant funded is probably one of the most challenging things for researchers, Morgan says, and the struggle will persist throughout one's career, for several reasons. For one thing, the research environment is more competitive than ever, Morgan says, and the new NIH grant format means researchers have to learn to write short, but still exciting, proposals. Also, researchers seem to think that "good science will speak for itself," and that "marketing" their work is somehow wrong, which Morgan says is the wrong attitude to take. Communication is very important in science, as is explaining your work to others. But there are two key "how-to's" for addressing these problems. For one thing, Morgan says, projects have to be designed to appeal to funding agencies and reviewers. "Your funding agency is not in the business of supporting you and your science (excepting the occasional career award). They are in the business of solving specific sets of problems defined by their leadership," Morgan says. So if they're going to fund you, they have to be happy with what they're seeing. And second, even though it may be a bitter lesson to learn, researchers have to learn that the reviewer is always right. "If you get a particularly biased review, you may wish to consider requesting a different reviewer next time. But apart from that, the reviewer is right because you're asking them for a big favor: to fund your grant," Morgan says. It may be time to learn some humility.
Good points. However funding
Good points. However funding agencies have a serious responsibility to commit that their reviewers will be objecting and knowledgeable in the field. My take is that there is lip service but insufficient real effort on this. No one takes a well-thought out intelligent rejection to heart, although it's disappointing. But the many experiences we have all had of reviews that were internally inconsistent or even nonsensical are insulting to our tremendous efforts at writing good proposals. Personally I think peer review is in failure mode and I favor professional panels that are truly objective, consistent, and answerable to their agencies and to the applicants.
Oops reviewers should be
Oops reviewers should be objective not objecting!
To get successfully grant
To get successfully grant funded, I have observed that the following strategy seems to work quite well:
1. Do the proposed research first! But don't mention this in the application. Just state that you have very preliminary research in strong support of the proposal.
2. Come up with an angle where by some kind of hypothesis is being tested. Ideally it should be very simple. You don't want to confuse the reviewers. Under no circumstances ever mention discovery-based research.
3. Rationalize that the proposed research will provide an insight into the diagnosis or treatment of a human disease. Obscure and rare diseases are fine.
3. Propose to do the work in a very simple model organism. Yeast, the fruit fly or the nematode worm are the best. This will usually appeal to a few people on the grant panel.
4. Whatever the problem is, a molecular biology strategy has to be the best. Make sure that some sort of genetic approach with mutants is being used. Try to highlight the use of RNAsi's or micro-RNA's to show that you are keeping up with the times.
5. Focus on just one or a few proteins, oops I means genes, in the project description. You don't want it to look like your fishing. I recommend that one of the genes encodes a protein kinase as it could be argued to be a drug target.
6. For future studies, mention that you intend to knock out or in the gene of interest in a mouse model after you have completed the proposed work.
Good luck, because no matter what you write, you will need this too.