Scientific Review

Scientific Review Officers like me often hear from reviewers about things that applicants have or haven’t done in their grant applications, and how those applications fare in peer review. Many of the issues are related to grantsmanship: writing a neat, tidy, clear and complete grant application that a reviewer will pay attention to despite having read umpteen other applications in the previous 48 hours. Others are more substantive issues with the science. I would like to share some of the main issues we hear about, starting in this post with human research protections.

Maybe you are a graduate student, a postdoc, or a new junior faculty member. You have carefully crafted a fellowship application or a career development application. Now, you sit on pins and needles hoping to hear that reviewers love what you propose and that the NIA will make an award. But wait! I wish that happy conjunction (reviewers love it, the NIA funds it) were always true. But in these times, it can happen that reviewers love it, but the NIA does not have the money to fund it. For fellowship and career development awards the unhappy conjunction (too much reviewer love for the money) also makes funding decisions particularly tricky.

You’ve traveled overnight between back-to-back meetings, rushed from the airport to a hotel in Bethesda, and dragged your bags and yourself to a stale ballroom just in time to review tons of grant applications in a single day. You open the door and breathe a sigh of relief when you see the welcoming scene of your smiling Scientific Review Officer (SRO), your colleagues, and of course light refreshments–

[sound of record screeching to a halt]

Buried within our NIA 2013 funding policy is the apparently shocking statement that our payline for NIA-reviewed research grant applications is 13. When the top score is 10 and the lowest possible score is 90, then a 13 is little short of perfect. We worry about this too. We know that we are leaving some truly outstanding work unpaid. How did this happen?