Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

Currently the NIH’s child care institute is asking for your opinion on what it should pursue. Please tell them what diseases they should focus on. With the right information and right leadership we can help many of the 80,000 people with these disorders.

I recently had the dubious distinction to participate in and serve on an national institutes of health grant review called an NIH study section. I’ve done this before and have reviewed lots of grants over the years, but there have been a lot of changes recently and it is a whole new experience that is [...]

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

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 [...]

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

I’m currently working on a fairly large grant application for a company. The company wants me to do research on a subject on which I am very comfortable and knowledgeable. The process of writing and securing a research agreement with a company is much different than with the NIH, NSF or most charitable foundations. I [...]

In science ideas are like a currency and often better than money. A scientist is only as valuable as their NEXT idea. Yes, I said next idea. Once the idea is made public it is no longer novel and loses value. If the idea is not patented it can be taken by anyone and changed [...]

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 [...]

The NIH needs to solicit and fund a massive effort to reduce, refine and replace the use of antibiotics. This is desperately needed because of the growing problem of drug resistance. Microbes become resistant to antibiotics via a kind of natural selection when the genes of the bacteria mutate and become resistant to our attempts [...]

So here is some math that I find very humorous. The NIH announced two months ago their challenge grants in support of the stimulus package, also known as ARRA. In the challenge grants it was announced that 200 grants would be awarded 1 million dollars each. That is the amount of the stimulus package for [...]