Okay, so I’m on a plane again and it is time to update my blog. I should be working on my next grant, but I need to do some mental calisthenics. Do people even use the word calisthenics anymore? Well, I used it so that is a start. Anyway, I am working on 4 grants simultaneously, writing reviews for 4 publications and reviewing the grants of others. That spells busy. All this is in my inbox and it is getting bigger every day. But the outbox does not grow as quickly as the inbox.

Why on earth did I schedule 4 grants at once you ask? Or, does that number not move you at all? Consider yourself fortunate if “grant” is not a dirty word. Grants are how a large amount of research, especially medical research, is done in the USA. A grant is awarded to researchers from the government, or state or a charity to try to find out something about a disease or medical condition. Without a grant there is no research. Without research there is no improvement in health care or progress in the quality of life.

That just teems wrong to me that people who spend their lives, like my life, working to help people need to go, hat in hand, to the federal government such that we can be allowed to make this country better. But that is the state of things. So, let’s get back to the grants I’m writing. A grant proposal is a work of fiction, in literary terms, because it talks about stuff that has not happened. The difference is that the grant’s author is promising to try to make it happen with the funds being requested.

I spend over 80% of my time writing new grants. Not thinking about how to make the medical advances I’ve promised, but taking a lot of time trying to keep the people in my lab pursuing those advances. It is a slow and painful process. Let me explain how slow:
It takes about 3 months of work to write one grant. The NIH takes about 6 months to review that grant and another 3 to decide if it is going to be funded. An overwhelming majority of grants are not funded. Ninety percent are not funded. So that means another 3 months to try to re-write the grant and the cycle repeats. So on average it takes two years of begging the powers that be to get funding to do any research work. Wow, is that ever a waste of time.

What is kind of funny is that the federal government reports to congress that it funds about 20% of the grants it receives because it counts the first try and the second try as one (research grants only get two strikes). So they double their batting average. The NIH seems to forget that it still takes me 3 months of work each time but they’ll say that 1 in 5 grants is funded so try 5 times to get a grant. Sorry, it is more like 10 times to get one grant. The federal government’s math on funding averages means that my time has no value on the first try. As I’ve said in my blog before, I submit 8 grants a year and hope to get one every 2 years. Last year I duly submitted more than 8 grants (10 I think) and got none. Let me put that in perspective, between myself, my staff and support personnel 10 grants corresponds to about 20 person months of work for no return. I might as well as had a job as a carpenter and demolition man where I demolished all that I built because there was nothing to show for it.

I’m due to get one grant this year, I hope, but really scrambling to get that additional grant. Without another grant very soon, less than two months, I will need to start shutting down parts of my research. That is a serious thing to consider. I’m not teaching students, I’m not writing papers, I’m not participating in other faculty duties, I’m trying to keep my research enterprise alive. This is a fight for survival and it irks me that the taking heads for the NIH report that 1 in 5 grants is funded when I’m approaching zero  for 14.

Just tell the truth NIH. You fund less than 1 in 10 grants, and the burden for paying for your unfunded mandate of grant writing is supported by individuals who lose creative time to work on power calculations to get maximum number of data per dollar. Yes, it is about dollars. How many dollars per datum drives part of this enterprise. Also, I am not supposed to be paid by grants to write other grants. So the university is supposed to pay me to write new grants. However, the university expects me to cover 90% of my salary by getting grant funding. Anyone notice a disconnect here? As I’ve said previously the feds have one set of rules and the locals have another and they often do not match. Let me spell out the mismatch. My federal grant funding pays for 90% of my salary and the university pays the other 10%. I spend a majority of my time writing grants for the federal government where I’m not supposed to bill the government for that time. My time should be spent working on drugs to save lives, but it is not. If you want to report me or the university go ahead. The party line that we all spout to the feds is that the grant writing is multipurpose for writing papers, writing reports, federal reporting and publishing educational articles used for teaching.

If you are reading this and are comfortable with the concept that we may all start dying from superbugs because there are no new medications to treat those diseases, than be happy, because you are getting your wish. If you want your children to have better medical care and technologies than you had, tell congress to support your local geek. Let me do my work to help people. After all helping people is the theme of my life as documented in My Ambulance Education and it continues to this day. All I want to do is save your life. Will you let me or am I destined to slog through the governmental paperwork that is grant writing forever?

I’m praying to the NIH Gods is the title of this blog for a big grant such that some of the pressure can be taken off me and I can get some research done as opposed to doing federal paperwork.