Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

I received a heart breaking email recently. Frankly it made me cry.

you risk is a legacy of tombstones all with the epitaph, “the placebo group were the lucky ones

A grant proposal is a work of fiction, in literary terms, because it talks about stuff that has not happened.

My favorite entity is of course administrators. But every once in a while administration tries to work with the grunts in the work force. The following really happened; names were changed and details redacted to ensure my future employment. Admin: You’ve not documented the frequency for performing this compliance task. Grunt: it is done when [...]

This is a follow up to my post of http://www.josephfclark.com/blog/?p=333, which I posted as a comment to that blog and wanted to post as a mini follow up blog here too. My Catch 22 in academia is concerning a conflict between federal laws and local laws/policy. Recently, I am happy to say, I am not [...]

I have the greatest respect and admiration for the NIH but they are missing something.

We are in the midst of a lost generation of graduate students. Grad students take 4-7 years to get a degree, but with 4 years of flat funding and now challenge grants’ funding being 1 in 100 there is a perception of no future in science by those students. No one wants to spend their [...]

I think President Obama needs to present a state of the sciences in address; like the state of the union. Yes, of course, I’m biased in this subject, but times are desperate. I work in a university hospital and train physicians and scientists at the cutting edge of technology. What we do is discover new [...]

The federal government is spending a lot of time and effort on a federal bailout or stimulus package. Some of this stimulus package money is going to medical research. Over ten billion dollars is allotted to the national institutes of health to fund medical research projects. This money is grant funding that is being done [...]