Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research

It is a summer day in 2009 in Cambridge, England, and K. (39) looks out of his lab window, wondering why he chose the life of a scientist [1]. Yet it had all begun so well! His undergraduate studies in Prague had excited him about biomedical research, and he went on to a PhD at an international laboratory in Heidelberg. There, he had every advantage, technical and intellectual, and his work had gone swimmingly. He had moved to a Wellcome-funded research institute in England in 1999. And although his postdoc grant, as is typical, was for only two years, he won a rare career development award that gave him some independence for four more years. A six-year postdoc was an unusual opportunity, and it allowed him to define his own research field. By 2004, he had published six experimental papers in good journals, and on four of these, he was first author. It was the high point in his career, and when he applied for posts in Cambridge, London, Stanford, and Tubingen, he was short-listed for them all. He chose Cambridge University and a Royal Society Research Fellowship that offered him up to ten years’ salary. This should have brought the peace of mind to plan projects that would take five years, or even longer. So, what went wrong? It had taken almost a year to prepare, submit, and be awarded his initial research grant (for late 2005–late 2008) from a publicly funded agency in the UK, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). Immediately, he hired a technician and started to train her carefully. During early 2006, he took on a postdoc, Frieda, and a student, and they both settled in well. However, by mid 2007, K. began to worry about his future: although the BBSRC grant had run for less than two years, it was already high time to apply for another. He submitted a new application in October 2007 and, although it was well reviewed and received a high rating, he found out in spring 2008 that it was not funded. As an insurance, he had concocted a different project (you cannot submit to different agencies with the same plans) and sent it to Cancer Research, UK, in February 2008—this application was also excellently reviewed but also turned down in August 2008. Now he was near the end of his initial grant, and his technician, who had a family to support, left to take a more secure job in a nearby research institute—laying waste to all her specialised knowledge that they had both worked so hard to build. Soon, Frieda’s postdoc grant was about to end, so K. applied to several local colleges and trusts to keep her going, but won her only another 6 months’ salary. Becoming anxious and not sleeping well, he had approached the Wellcome Trust in the autumn of 2008 with a rewritten and updated version of the rejected BBSRC project. But, with her extra 6 months over in April 2009 and no security (she has two small children), Frieda had been concentrating less and less on her work; she reluctantly abandoned her lifelong ambition to be a researcher. She looked for a job in science publishing or in the granting agencies— both of which, ironically, offer better working conditions and much better security of employment than research. That morning, Frieda had been offered a post as assistant editor of a journal, and it was time to organise her leaving party. So, on this summer day in 2009, K. has one student left in his group and has one grant application outstanding. If he gets the grant, the salary dedicated for Frieda could be given to a new postdoc, but that person would have to be trained all over again. Yes, the second half of 2007 and all of 2008 had been a nightmare—14 of these 18 months had been almost entirely devoted to writing grant applications. K. now sees how he has changed from being an enthusiastic scientist into an insecure bureaucrat. He feels he has lost much of his last 3 years and wasted his BBSRC grant, despite doing his very best (see Box 1). K.’s plight (an authentic one) illustrates how the present funding system in science eats its own seed corn [2]. To expect a young scientist to recruit and train students and postdocs as well as producing and publishing new and original work within two years (in order to fuel the next grant application) is preposterous. It is neither right nor sensible to ask scientists to become astrologists and predict precisely the path their research will follow—and then to judge them on how persuasively they can put over this fiction. It takes far too long to write a grant because the requirements are so complex and demanding. Applications have become so detailed