DrugMonkey

Thoughts on a proposal to escalate grant-acquisition difficulty

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:50:49 -0500

A recent post noted the decision by the NHLBI to adopt a payline policy that varied by grant revision status. The new R01 submissions would be subject to a 16% payline, the first revision to a 9% payline and any left-over grandfathered second revision A2 applications to a 7% payline.

In the course of discussion a reader proposed that what we really need is for the NIH to grade the payline based on how many grants a given PI already has. Commenter qaz said:

Maybe it would be enough to share the funding around better - make the first R01 easy to fund, the second harder, etc. If we made it possible for people to be funded at the 25% range (or even below that) if they didn't have any other grants, then maybe it wouldn't be a problem.

This idea was seconded by Principle Investigator.

Knowing a landmined topic when I see it, I had a few observations.

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Comparing SfN Social Media Experiment with a BlogTwitty Meeting

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:12:00 -0500

As I noted previously The Society for Neuroscience encouraged its members to blog and Twitt the annual meeting in Chicago (Oct 17-22, 2009). The experiment was far from a smashing success although I do believe that there were some hints of what could / should be for the future. The main problem* was, I wager, one of numbers. It was a meeting that registered some 30,000 attendees. I counted something maybe on the order of 30 people actively trying to Twitt or blog the meeting. I think you have to have a bit higher participation for the conversation to really take off, but that's just speculation.

At any rate, I had a thought today. The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism is holding an event that provides an interesting contrast.

USC Annenberg's California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships program is holding a day-long brainstorming event aimed at helping Annenberg leaders launch a new, all-expenses-paid, professional seminar series to educate and encourage dialogue among health professional bloggers and Health 2.0 visionaries. The attendees, who include leading Health 2.0 professionals Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog and Dr. Val Jones of BetterHealth.com, will discuss the best ways to promote transparency, credibility, accuracy and journalistic principles for the emerging health blogosphere, as well as exposure to larger public health and community health policy issues. This event is by invitation only.

Follow the Twittering on this meeting by the #uscblogcon hashtag. I think this may give you some ideas of what could be, if you are on the fence as to whether Twittering/blogging scientific meetings would have value.
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*apart from some technical difficulties with WiFi coverage and too many iPhoners loading up the AT&T network.

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Kudos to NHLBI for getting serious about breaking the grant revision cycle

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:18:14 -0500

Well, well, well. As my more dedicated readers are well aware one of my ongoing criticisms of the peer review of NIH grants is the seeming obsession with revision status of the application. I've just reposted this old entry from 2007.

I was, quite naturally, sensitized to this issue originally as a grant applicant. As with many of you, I developed this sneaking suspicion that complaints and bad scores on the original submission of some of my proposals were not in good faith. I mean this in the usual sense that the same or essentially unchanged parts of the proposal were stomped on very hard on the first submission and essentially ignored later. Also from the growing realization that essentially none of my more-junior colleagues and friends had received an award un-revised.

Some years down the road, I entered service on a study section and in hearing the way grants of the three different revision steps were reviewed, well, I started to suspect.

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What to do when recruitment promises evaporate?

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:59:46 -0500

As I have noted before, if there is one modal complaint of the newly hired Assistant Professor in the laboratory sciences...

...(i)t boils down to a failure of the hiring University to live up to the spirit (and even letter) of what was promised during the recruiting phase. The space that magically becomes "shared space". The startup funds that get reduced or restricted. The surprises that one is supposed to pay for "out of your startup". The new building renovations that are slow, "Oh just use this temporary space for now" becomes "Well, you have a lab we promised that to the next sucker". Etc. The excuse is almost always "The dean won't go for it", "The dean denied it" and the like while the Chair insists s/he went to the mat for you. Everyone has problems doncha know....

This brings me to today's edition of "Ask DrugMonkey".

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Repost: Preferential Funding for First Submissions of NIH Grants

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:37:00 -0500

I have a post I'm working on that references a topic I've been talking about on the blog for a long time. I was about to quote extensively from this one but I figured I'd just better repost the whole thing. This originally appeared on 10 Sep 2007.

I've made reference a time or two to what I describe as "bias" for amended (revised) applications. In the lifecycle of the standard, investigator initiated research project grant (the R01) application, it is initially submitted and reviewed and if not funded, the application can be revised/amended one (called the A1) or two (A2) times. (Thereafter the PI must submit a substantially new proposal.) First, the evidence that revised applications score better and are more likely to get funded relative to initial submissions is readily available.

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The Politics of Drug Abuse Research Funding

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:43:22 -0500

Our good blogfriend, Scibling and scientist-artist BioE! has a post up discussing the intersection of drug abuse health care, drug abuse science, research funding and the political process. I recommend you start with:

Double standards, politics, and drug treatment research

But there's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment...Maybe it's because these other addicts are meth addicts, or potheads, or heroin addicts - probably not people you relate to or approve of. That makes it pretty easy for the media to take cheap shots at crack, etc. addicts, and question whether we should waste money trying to help them...But here's an even easier target than pot smokers: drug-using Thai transgendered prostitutes!

That last is not a joke.

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Gay Slurs in Hockey

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:20:15 -0500

It starts off as a very simple issue of socio-political attitudes. Columnist Justin Bourne, former minor league pro, writes in USA Today:

In my days as a hockey player, I did nothing but contribute to hockey's culture of homophobia and prejudice against gays. I used gay slurs more times than I'd like to admit. Six months after I left my last professional locker room, I felt a twinge of regret, followed by a full-out, stomach punch of regret. And by the time I finished the first draft of this column, I was disgusted with myself.

It is a great column and I recommend you click through and read the whole thing.

Back to my interest today, he makes the usual exhortation in the middle of the piece.

We can't wait another two decades ignoring the small but consistent strides of progress that the world outside sport is making.

We need to make a change now, because kids who move away from home to play junior hockey at 16 or 17 are still impressionable. If they don't encounter a good role model, the seeds are sown for a person, who after trying to fit in, thinks it's OK to drink, treat women a certain way and use homosexuality as a punchline.

Simple isn't it? The kind of statement we can all get behind, right?

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UK Home Office Restores Drug Science to the Back of the Bus

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:56:47 -0500

When I last took up the quixotic campaign of David Nutt, Ph.D., Professor of Psychopharmacology, Univ. of Bristol and former Chair of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, it was to point out his belief that MDMA should be downgraded to a lesser harm category. He had issued opinion pieces comparing MDMA's propensity for causing harm favorably with alcohol and waxed enthusiastic about the current clinical trials. The trigger for my post was his absurdist essay on the unfortunate harms to public health that are associated with addiction to "equasy".

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Please Welcome the New Sb StatsDude!

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:57:51 -0500

Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, has joined the Scienceblogs as author of Applied Statistics. One look at his professional page and you will see why I am so happy to have him here:

Andrew has done research on a wide range of topics, including: ...[snip]... methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference,

I think I am going to enjoy having this guy around. If you want to know what you are in for, visit his old blog for a taste.

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"..have to be ten times more charmin' than that Arnold on Green Acres, know what I'm saying?"

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:34:05 -0500

I'd seen some sort of press release on this before but for some reason there is a new NIH brag note out today. It informs us that the NIH will be investing $27 Million to build yet another useless failed attempt to create social networking and professional networking entities that are specific to scientists.

Charming and Loaded! [source]Before into the specifics, let's talk about opportunity cost. Thanks to a newfound tool to snoop Indirect Cost rates I feel more comfortable with my assertion that ~55% is a decent estimated IDC rate for the larger public Universities with heavy research focus. An IDC rate of ~90% applies to a number of the smaller, private research institutions ~~that think very highly of themselves~~ with a big reputation. This gives us our range for the full-modular R01 ($250,000 in direct costs for 5 years) as something between $387,500 / yr ($1.94M for 5 yrs) and $475,000 / yr ($2.38M / 5yrs). In rough numbers we are talking about anywhere from 11 to 14 full-modular R01 awards that are being poured into this project.

Of course, since this is the ARRA / stimulus funding, this amount of money is being poured in over a mere two years. Thus, 28-35 two-year intervals of full-modular R01 funding.

It better be one charming [muppethugging] pig*.

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Speaking of College Journalism on MDMA

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:37:58 -0500

Hey, here's another one! The University of Cincinnati school paper has a bit entitled "Ecstasy might be linked to mental deficits" by one Gin A. Ando.

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Last Chance to Science-Up Some Schools

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:12:13 -0500

I have been a bit distracted and keep forgetting to remind you that the DonorsChoose Social Media Challenge is coming to a close. If you keep meaning to donate to one of our selected projects or those of another ScienceBlogger (or heck, any project at all), now's the time. The challenge ends at the end of the month. As always, don't be too shy to donate even a little bit. Every $5 or even $1 inches those projects that much closer to funding. And I won't lie, I love the idea of lots of people getting involved, even if they don't have a huge amount to give.

I'm looking forward to the end of the fundraising drive because I get to distribute some Reader Appreciation Prizes to some of our reader/contributors.
Don't forget to forward me your confirmation if you want to enter the drawing. Even if you don't fancy wearing our nameplate, you'll be able to shop at a selected number of other Sb'er schwagshops as well. So go donate, help some kids learn a little more science and throw your hat in the ring for a thank you from Your Humble Narrator.

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Finally, a half-decent assessment of the New Investigator situation in NIHland

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:00:35 -0500

I thought one of the Twitts that I follow was intentionally baiting me by linking a recent editorial in Nature Neuroscience. Turns out I am very pleasantly surprised by the degree of balance. For background, this editorial takes up the hoopla over the practice of the NIH in using out-of-initial-priority-score exceptions (aka "pickups") to fund investigators who have never held a major NIH research grant before. I had observations here and here. To summarize, I am usually disappointed with the lack of understanding of the NIH grant business displayed by media accounts of this particular nuance of the funding picture.

Nature Neuroscience appears to grasp nuance, bravo.

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Entertain me

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:48:21 -0500

The person who posts a link to a blog related to substance abuse or publicly funded science careers that 1) I have not seen before* and 2) that most amuses me by the end of the day wins a Reader Appreciation Prize. Reference to your own blog counts.

that is all.

/ennui

*or at least can't recall

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College Newspaper Writing in the GoogleAge

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:27:19 -0500

I ran across an article in a college newspaper, I think via a Google news search for "MDMA". Cause I do that. The article is "Rocking and Rolling: An Inside Look at SoCal's Rave Culture" in the University of California, Irvine paper under the byline of one Stephanie Vatz. My original response was via a Twitt:

drugmonkeyblog So completely full of FAIL that I don't even know where to start. http://tinyurl.com/yz6gmlg #MDMA

I then started wasting my time Twitting one-liner objections but then a comment by @dr_leigh (who you really should be following) started me thinking about the changing nature of college journalism.

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