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 this program totaling $200,000,000.

Here is the humorous math. 20,000 grants were submitted. That means the odds of a grant being awarded is 1 in 100. That is kind of funny because the normal odds for NIH grants to be funded is 10 times better than that.

One might ask, what else could be worthy of a chuckle? Ok, some more math; in my case it takes hundreds of hours to write a grant. Let’s put a number of 3 weeks of work. The time to put together a grant is more than my time though as my employees work on the grants as well. So for each grant multiple person weeks are needed. Assuming that the cost in salaries to write and assemble one grant is; $5000.00 now multiply that by 20,000 grants. The result is $100,000,000 to write the grants. Where does that $100,000,000 come from? It does not come from the ARRA. It comes from discretionary funds in the institutions who are already strapped for cash. It is an investment hoping for a return. The cost of that investment is high because during that time, I ignored my students and teaching to focus on writing challenge grants to the ARRA. So there are financial and professional costs to writing grants like this.

Humorously, the costs of the challenge grants do not end there. Believe it or not someone has to read those grants to make decisions on who gets the funding. Now this is very funny. On average it takes 8 hours of work to read and review one grant. The average reviewer will review 10 grants. That means that 90% of the reviewers will NOT read a grant that will be funded. Remember, only one in 100 grants will be funded. But again those reviewers will spend 80 hours of work, two normal work weeks, reviewing grants. I estimate that in time and effort it will cost $24,000,000 to review the 20,000 ARRA grants. Add that to the cost of writing the grants the total cost for writing and reviewing the challenge grants is $124,000,000 all spent to fund $200,000,000 of stimulus money. So the net infusion of dollars into the economy is; $76,000,000. Finally because not all the money will go to fund research only about $45,000,000 will be used by the people writing the grants.

One more bit of math. I submitted 5 challenge grants. That increased my odds of getting funded from 1 out of one hundred to 5%.

I do not however think for one second that the NIH has done anything wrong. I think that the federal government should not micromanage the agencies who are getting funding. Not when the DHHS and NIH have been highly successful and prudent with their spending.

The truth is this is not funny. But if I do not laugh about it, I’ll cry.