Getting your R01 funded

Why am I making all this fuss over the latest stats on acceptance rate of general RO1 grants distributed by the National Institute of Health (NIH) ? This is the money that keeps the biomedical/life sciences alive in the US. The numbers indicate that fewer grants are aproved on the first submission. To get your grant funded, you have to resubmit more and more. The longer it takes to get your grant approved, the more your career is in jeopardy. Every time your grant request is turned down, it's another 3-4 months until you can resubmit it to the NIH. If you spend all your time writing and submitting grants, you can't get any new work done. Here are more stats on the types of grants approved (generously compiled and donated by PhysioProf):

i-5137ec39ffd98ec4878c85bb438ab736-resubmisssion.jpg

Over the years, the NIH has been accepting more and more grants that have been round the bend 2-3 times. What a waste of time for all those involved. As Mike has mentioned, this is a minor nuisance for senior researchers, but a career-threatening burden to junior professors. On top of that senior scientists have the manpower to bolster their grants with new data with every resubmission, thus these resubmitted grants are backed by additional "preliminary results". Junior faculty don't have this luxury. (And if your "preliminary data" includes several papers which fulfill half of your aims, is the data still "preliminary"?) The NIH needs to adjust its priorities to help junior faculty - or else risk killing off promising new labs with all their potential to explore new fields and develop new technologies.

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Alex,

that's a great point. When roughly 60% of accepted R01s are resubmissions, it screws everything up.

A very good point.....writing revisions of grants all the time takes a lot out of not just the PI, but the students involved as well (particularly in small labs). And I know junior PI's who got very good scores (10 percentile in their first review), who had to resubmit them twice! That's getting to be absurd. In one RO1 case (a renewal for a young faculty just tenured), the second review came back with no comments and a ~9 percentile, but they still had to submit it a third time.

Talk about tough times.

Someone asked me how this was compiled. Here is what PysioProf wrote to me:

I obtained the data by searching CRISP for new grants awarded each year containing "-01", "-01A1", or "-01A2" suffixes in the grant number. The 2006 fiscal year data are current as of May of this year.

It would be interesting to see this graph overlaid with the number of new biomedical PhDs awarded per year.

About the preliminary data that covers half the specific aims? We call it retroactive funding, I don't know how it's referred to up there.