How to get and keep your lab funded

Abstract

Much has been written about the seemingly capricious manner by which grant proposals are ranked and awarded by the National Institutes of Health and similar agencies, yet some scientists are able to maintain stable funding over long periods of time. While raw luck may certainly play a role in this process, particularly when paylines are tight, it is also possible that skill—in the art of grant writing at least—could represent a decisive factor. Here, I submit that, even as we attempt to reform and one day perfect the grant review process, there are actions that applicants can take today to get better results from the system we have.

While one might think that an applicant’s stellar reputation, brilliant ideas, and tantalizing preliminary data would guarantee abundant funding, sadly, such is not always the case. Many traditional granting agencies tend to lean conservative, meaning that, like trial lawyers, they don’t like to see a question posed if one doesn’t already have a pretty good idea of the answer (Lee, 2007; Maxmen, 2009; McNeil, 2014; Voosen, 2015). This tendency dictates certain techniques in grant preparation that, for many scientists, go strongly against the grain. In particular, risk-taking, even by highly qualified, accomplished applicants, is often unrewarded, and perhaps even actively punished, in grant reviews (German, 2015; Gallo et al., 2018). Conversely, if the context is interesting enough and detailed mechanisms can be discovered or at least confirmed, incremental experiments that take one from point A to B can be easier to fund.

Over the course of 26 years of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I’ve learned a few things about the roles of luck and skill in obtaining grants, and I have distilled them into 10 principles and a few corollaries. While following these principles will not guarantee success, they have worked well for me and many others whom I have mentored.

1. Don’t apply for something you won’t get. Ted Williams was one of the best and most disciplined hitters in baseball history. By relentless study of his own at-bats (and this, before the era of modern, portable video), he was able to determine his success in hitting pitches located in each of 77 different, baseball-sized cells in the strike zone (Williams and Underwood, 1986). Over time, he learned to ignore pitches that were difficult for him to hit. Similarly, there are many tempting grant proposals that are dangled in front of scientists in the form of Requests for Applications (RFAs), but that doesn’t mean you should apply for them, as the amount of time and effort wasted on an unsuccessful application can be considerable. Instead, you should focus on opportunities in the fat part of your strike zone, aiming for a similar batting average as Ted Williams; that is, about a third of your at-bats should result in hits. For junior investigators who lack the experience to define their strike zone, let interest be your main guide regarding whether to apply for RFAs and don’t worry too much if you initially strike out more often than the veterans at your institution.

2. Don’t get married to any one protein or gene, unless it’s a trophy spouse. Some genes are so important to cell biology that you can spend an entire career fruitfully examining their regulation and function. However, such molecules are few in number, and anyway, your ability to keep coming up with fresh angles will decline with time. If you are a gene- or protein-centric scientist, it is best to consider a divorce from your current research partner every decade or so.

3. You can make a dead frog twitch, but you can’t shock it back to life. However much you love your grant proposal, and however flushed with outrage you become when reviewers do not share your ardor, there are many cases where it’s best to just let it go. A score of greater than 4 on certain aspects of an NIH-scored proposal, particularly in the category of “investigator” or “environment,” is, in general, fatal. While it can be exceedingly difficult to rein in emotions, you shouldn’t take such comments too personally. For example, the unkindest cut—being rated badly in the investigator column—may simply mean that the reviewers felt your skills did not match what the project requires, not that you, personally, are an unskilled person. That said, let’s be clear: in this system or any other, reviewers can be unkind, unfair, unwise, and worse. Instead—maybe after a drink or two, and definitely after at least one night’s sleep—you should consider whether it’s time to surrender the battle (as some proposals simply cannot be resurrected) while regrouping to prosecute the war on another day on another front.

4. In grant writing, “significance” is overrated and storytelling is underrated. This point has been stressed by others, but can hardly be overemphasized (Padian, 2018). For reasons perhaps best understood by cognitive scientists, humans respond better to stories than to facts and figures, however artfully arranged (Haven, 2007; Zak, 2014). You should use that trait to your advantage by crafting your proposal as a tale of wonder. Think about your proposal as a novel: who are its protagonists and what’s so interesting about them (background section); what’s their recent back story (preliminary data); what problems might they encounter and how might they be resolved (experimental section); and finally, when the journey’s over in 5 years, why will it all have mattered (summary)? If your reviewer becomes engrossed in your tale, minor quibbles about the particulars of the experiments you’ve proposed (aka “death by a thousand cuts”) might be overlooked or forgiven. How best to refine such skills? Some academic centers offer formal training in grant writing or employ professional writers to help the faculty, and such resources should be used where available. Whether or not this is the case at your institution, you can improve your writing by intentional practice, using a more critical ear and eye than usual. This exercise need not entail extra work, as many scientists by necessity spend long hours at their keyboards dealing with copious amounts of correspondence. While emails often deal with the mundane, even these brief missives can be done with elegance and panache if you consciously pay attention to basic compositional principles. When in doubt, you could do worse than heed the advice given to the poet W. S. Merwin by Ezra Pound: “Write 75 lines a day” (Lake, 2010). Doing so can help hone your skills at storytelling and, in turn, help you become a better grant writer.

On the other hand, most grant writers easily ace the “significance” section, as, given how little we understand about basic mechanisms in cell biology, let alone how these relate to important human ailments, it is not at all difficult to link your proposed work to some weighty matter of obvious importance. Because this section is akin, in baseball terms, to a slow pitch down the middle of the plate, you are unlikely to strike out no matter what you write, and you shouldn’t need to spend more than 15 minutes writing it.

I am not arguing that this is how things should be or that this is the best of all possible systems, and I totally agree that well-designed experiments, logically ordered, should be attractive, even if one lacks the art of blarney, but good storytelling skills will take you a long way with the system we have.

5. Unbiased screens are the wellspring of discovery; never propose one. Given the value of screens, this idea can be difficult to accept, but the fact is that our current system favors experimental schemes that flesh out existing models rather than those that could create new ones. If you want to explore, you’ll need to figure out a way to do it without asking anyone to pay for it. This is a place where institutional pilot grants or philanthropy can be most helpful. Alternatively, if a screen is vital to your project and must be part of your aims, you will need to unambiguously show that the proposed schema works and, ideally, tease your reviewers with a few preliminary hits that make them hunger for more.

6. Build cell and animal models on your own time and dime. Similarly, if you use newly created cell or animal models to test your ideas, these are apt be seen favorably by reviewers, as they demonstrate your long-term planning and devotion to the project as well as your unique position to carry out the work. That said, reviewers generally look harshly on plans to create such models. To find the funds to carry out this vital work, see point 5.

7. If you need collaborators, go straight to the top. Oftentimes you might be tempted to turn to your nearest colleagues who have the skills to assist in the design and/or execution of experiments. You should resist this impulse, unless you have a preexisting, productive relationship with said colleagues, documented by joint publications and/or grants. Otherwise, it’s often better to get a letter of support from someone recognized as the best in the business at whatever tasks need assistance. If you don’t know such people, you should get to know them, as their names and commitments can add helpful gravitas to your proposal.

8. Specific aims should be sketched with chalk, not etched in stone. While one needs to stay within proper ethical limits, you should recognize the wisdom in the old saying about battle plans: they rarely survive first contact with the enemy. Scientific research being as unpredictable as it is, your initial plans are likely to change, and there is no shame in that. Indeed, adaptability is a cardinal virtue in research, and if you need to change plans, even radically, you should go where the experiments take you, irrespective of your stated specific aims. A corollary to this idea is that, by the time your grant is submitted, aim 1 should be largely complete, as the line between what represents definitive preliminary data and what represents experiments in aim 1 can be exceedingly fuzzy.

9. Parsing study section rosters is about as useful as reading tea leaves. Too much time and energy is devoted to predicting the optimal study section for your proposal. With some exceptions, it is just as well to let the NIH staff decide. Just because you know someone on the study section, that doesn’t mean that person will be the one to evaluate your proposal or that you will get a favorable review.

10. Call your program officer if you must, but don’t expect too much. In my experience, if you need to call your program officer, you are already in a bad place. Program officers are generally as helpful as they can be, which is to say, not all that helpful. This is not because they are bad or ineffective people; it’s because they have limited ability to do what you want—namely, bump your grant to funded status. If you do contact your program officer, it is not consolation you should seek, but advice as to his or her “read” of the review and suggestions for how to improve the proposal.

In summary: while the system we have is deeply flawed and often unfair, it is not totally random. As the great baseball executive Branch Rickey is quoted as saying: “Luck is the residue of design.” When applied to the world of NIH grant funding, I submit that there are many things you can do to make yourself more likely to be lucky.

Abbreviations used:

NIH

National Institutes of Health

RFAs

requests for applications