Sam Wang (an old friend of Peter's) and Sandra Aamodt have an interesting proposal in today's NY Times for spending a chunk of the NIH's $8B stimulus funds: hire a bunch of recent college graduates as lab techs in a program modeled after Teach for America. The goal is to provide the needed supply of cheap lab labor... read more

There's a piece in this week's Chronicle about some possible changes in the NIH's grant-making process. About 6 months ago, the NIH solicited suggestions from the general public for ways to improve the process, and an advisory committee has been sifting through the thousands of ideas they received. The article d... read more

Ginny C just pointed me to a recent FASEB presentation that summarizes recent trends in the life sciences labor market. It's great that they have done this, since I suspect a lot of people don't know the big picture, and FASEB has a very broad reach. Give it a read. There is a great deal of overlap with Paula S... read more

While the NIH budget doubling has created a crisis for life sciences grant applicants, what about its benefits? One of the most pronounced effects of the budget doubling was a huge building spree by medical schools. Presumably there has also been an increase in research output, right? A new NSF report makes me ... read more

As I read Geoff’s posts about the University of Kansas Medical Center, and the seeming mismatch between what they are clearly expecting with regard to NIH funding and what the national NIH funding picture looks like I made me wonder: how could an institution pull off a major increase in NIH funding? The answer is... read more

Kansas University announced an ambitious $800 million initiative today to add 900,000 square feet of research space to the medical school and to hire 244 new researchers. > The plan is part of a broader effort to roughly double the medical school’s research grants, which totaled $88 million in 2006, over five yea... read more

Reader Eric has some strong words about the current situation at the NIH: > "As a scientist, it hurts me to say that I don't want academic scientists to get out of their recent NIH funding quagmire. Let them suffer painful contraction...they deserve it. Let's throw in a sudden cut-off of their cheap foreign labor... read more

Success rates for NIH R01 grants have been falling fast over the last few years, to the great dismay of life scientists. Rates peaked at 32% in 1999, then fell to 23% in 2005. In an article in *Science*, Elias Zerhouni blamed increasing numbers of grant applications: the number of applications for R01s increased... read more

I'm heading up to NBER next week to spend a month working with Richard Freeman. One of the things I will be looking into (assuming I can get some data sets) is what's going on at NIH with the falling approval rates for R01 grants. Expect lots of interesting things. One symptom of the current troubles that I rec... read more

I'm in the process of tracking down some data to help me figure out what's really going on with the NIH grant acceptance rates. In the process, I had an interesting conversation with a friend at NIH yesterday. He tells me that he's seen some data that suggest that a lot of the new applications are not from new, fi... read more