Kinda scary

Up until very recently the very low rate of success of grant applications submitted to the NIH has been disturbing yet, to me, abstract. However, over the past week I have spoken to two different investigators whose grants were scored at around the 18th percentile (in other words, better than over 80% of the competing applications) and yet did not get funded. And one was a New Investigator. I had heard that only  the top 8-14% or so of applications were winning funding, but these first-hand concrete examples really drove the ugly reality home. Remember that due to the soft money system investigators rely on grants to put food on the table (i.e., have an income). Hmmm . . . maybe it's time to dust off my stethoscope.