In my opinion, scientific grants have been allocated unfairly to certain kinds of research, and the trend seems to be for the worse.
There is a recent paper published by Peter A Lawrence entitled “Real lives and white lies in the funding of scientific research,” which exemplifies my thinking.
The criterion of grant approval seems to be quite illogical, focusing on political preferences instead of scientific quality. For example, if they give you a maximum of 5 pages of space in the grant application to write your project plan, then you had better use it all, or you may be passed over because your project does not have enough “meat.” Does this make sense? Where are we going with all this?
Adolfo Cotter, MD
Sep 19/2009
