The Grant (here, here, here) is finally done and going in Fed Ex tomorrow morning. It's been a long haul and we will undoubtedly be sending in preliminary results or new publications between now and the end of September, since the review isn't until November. That's right. I've been working on it for a year and now we won't find out anything until next December. The current funding period goes until a year from now. We've proposed to do a lot of complicated science over 5 years, which always makes me think of the saying that there is only 2 things that can go wrong when you submit a grant. The first is that you don't get it. The second is that you do.
We didn't have a scale that could handle it in the office, so I don't know how much it weighs, but it's 3.5" thick and 796 pages, although not 796 pages of science. About 300 pages are budgets, biosketches, compliance assurances, personnel lists, etc., some even more time consuming per page than the science, although that was still about 500 pages of text and figures. Then there is another 250 pages in an Appendix, but that went on a CD-ROM, so there's nothing impressive to see.
Here's a pic of the six copies we made to send out to NIH. On the wall you can see some of the checklists the staff used to keep track of all the pieces.
Now I plan to give my pituitary-adrenal axis a rest.
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I wish I could say the same thing. Let's see, two DOD grants due May 5, one and possibly two R01s to be done on June 5. Then there are the Komen grants due in July or August, as well as my competitive renewal in July.
Damn.
Orac: Yes, it's the Chinese water drip torture. It never seems to stop. In actuality I have a 4 pg. preproposal due at CDC a week from today but that seems so insignificant I didn't even count it. But good luck on that schedule. It's a crusher. While this grant was big, I also had lots of help I expect you don't have for an RO1 or DoD grant. I also don't have clinical responsibilities. Frankly, I couldn't do what you are doing, at least not at my age. Hats off to you.
This is insane. We've got to change the system. You can't have our best scientists spending large hunks of their valuable time on grantsmanship.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to have an answer to this problem.
Not sure what the answer is, Larry, but compared to the arts situation, the grants race is paradise. A friend who has won the biggest U.S. literary awards and grants still has to fit in her fiction writing between searches for agents/publishers and grabbing any editing job, no matter how basic, that comes her way in order to eat. And she is a *successful* author. Same with my relative whose art has shown worldwide in major venues. Again, whatever the answer is, globalized monopoly capitalism does not appear to be it.
Why send by scab Fed Ex? UPS and the good old USPS are union.
PS: At UAW, I think we sent by DSL because Fed Ex blocked an organizing drive by going to the Railway Labor Board, which insists that the only election allowed is national.
Congrats Revere. Time for a pre-scheduled mental breakdown of a pre-specified duration, perhaps?
The Australian system went online this year and was such a disaster that it even started making the major newspapers.