Sally Rockey, the deputy director of extramural research at the US National Institutes of Health, dives into the source of the increase in grant applications seen at NIH. At the Rock Talk blog, she notes that between 1998 and 2011, the amount of money requested by research project grants increased from $4.4 billion to more than $13 billion, while competing application funding increased from $1 billion to $2 billion in that same timeframe.