Research Funding

So as an academic researcher I'm dependent on outside sources of funding to pay for my research; thankfully not for my salary, just for the tools/chemicals I use. Fortunately what I do most of the time isn't all that expensive. Now that I have the main instruments for my research lab the chemicals I use are needed in very small quantities and typically don't cost much; though some can easily top $1,000 per gram. Now not being chemists/scientists some of you may not be able to relate to how expensive this is, let's just say that if a Mars bar was made from one of these chemicals it would be about $60,000; and it would not have any caramel filling :(

So to pay for the work I need to write grants to a number of funds/foundations/agencies that have been established to provide the money for research. Typically the most substantial of these are government agencies, such as NIH in the US and NSERC in Canada, so yes your tax dollars go to pay for my research. The reason the governments back these research funds is to facilitate scientific discoveries that will benefit the country and the world; you know, things like DNA sequencing, weather forecasting, drug development and the whole internet thing just to name a few.

Anyway, a few days ago I got back the reviews on my latest grant submission, and like all the rest it was not funded. Of course this is typical of most grants, the funding rate for this particular agency was only 28% this year. So despite getting very good evaluations by the three reviewers (5/5, 4/5 and 5/5) I didn't get any money. At least I can take some solace in the fact that the score of the grant improved greatly over the previous version that was submitted. In fact last year I learned that I had not been accepted for funding in late December, this time I found out at the end of January; likely in the last round of cuts. So at least I'm on the right track, hopefully the next few grants will be more successful.

The most positive news of late on the granting front is the fact that the US government is no longer being run by a moron. Under Obama's leadership it appears that there has been a renewed commitment to scientific research; with a desire to double research funding over the next ten years. Let me just say one other thing about this: woo hoo! Unfortunately, things seem to be going in the opposite direction for Canadian research. The latest version of the Harper budget doesn't include any funding for Genome Canada, a primary source of funding for large scale genetic research in Canada. But hey, who needs to do genetic research, it's only useful in fields of medicine, agriculture, archeology, biology... what good would that be to Canadians? I'm seriously doubt that the Harper government has a much better plan for the (comparably small sum of) $140 million that Genome Canada would have needed.