The virtuous Cycle

Grant writing has become a very important aspect of my current position in academia. Without an influx of money soon, my position will disappear, and I will once again be unemployed. But that is a story for another day.  Today, I want to talk about the Virtuous Cycle.  One may question my credentials for writing this piece.  All I'll say is that this piece comes from 1.5 years working in the College of Pharmacy, and 19 years as a scientist in Pharma.  Many of the issues discussed below have come up in Parke-Davis and Pfizer.

Since I began my stint at the College there has been a constant debate about grantsmanship:  What can we do to make our grant application stronger, and what must we avoid.  The things to avoid seem to be the easiest to recognize, but they can sneak up on you quickly.  First, you must identify the potential source of funding and learn their application requirements.  An application in the wrong format (font, margins, number of pages, required forms, required signatures …) or sent after the deadline is DOA.  When the instructions are ambiguous, you must ask for clarification.  The last FOA (funding opportunity announcement) I responded to was obviously written by a committee.  It asked for the same information in three places, but included page limits that made this impossible. Having surmounted this hurdle, the next is to make sure that your research is what they are looking to fund.  One must contact the funding organization and have a chat with the appropriate person to ask if what you are about to propose (in summary, not the specifics) is what they had in mind.  Why waste your grant writing effort?  Let's assume that we have the right format and are proposing studies in the right general area, what is going to make your proposal more pleasing to the review committee than the others?  The general consensus is that the proposal needs to: (1) Propose interesting science; (2) have enough precedent and preliminary data that the reviewers believe it can be done; (3) avoid relying on a single experiment or idea that may, if not achievable or wrong, stymie the rest of the proposal; (4) convince the reviewer that your team has the knowledge and experience to do the research; (5) convince the reviewers that it needs to be done now.

There seem to be a relatively small number of people who, despite the waxing and waning of the popularity of their field of expertise, seem to attract grant funding again and again.  To explain this phenomenon, I invoke the Virtuous Cycle.

I am borrowing the phrase virtuous cycle from the field of economics/management.  The diagram above is based upon one in the Wikipedia entry for Virtuous Cycle.  The gist here is that increased production and increased efficiency can feed off each other and, if done well, rapidly produce large amounts of good, cheap product from humble beginnings.  I believe that something similar is true in science.  It seems reasonable to put Funding at the apex of the figure because funding is the beginning of the process.  Each new Professor gets a start-up package that covers the initial costs to get around the cycle once.  Those that succeed manage to get around the cycle many times, usually with two or more lines of research co-occurring.



Let me run through how it works.  One of the things you have to do on a regular basis is attract students.  If the research that you are proposing is not of sufficient scope and interest to make a good Ph.D. thesis and/or launch a postdoc into a decent job, you will have a hard time getting good help.  Once you do, of course, it's time to get down to work.  Professor Darren Griffin of the University of Kent, near Canterbury in Southern England, once wrote, "The only way to do good research is to get on with it." Quite right.  Develop new methods, generate novel reagents, perform experiments, and test those hypotheses.  Learn something!  It's exciting stuff!  But don’t forget the big picture.  Analyze the results in the context of the field and reformulate your ideas.  This is when you need to share your results with the other in your field, but don’t be too hasty.  Get the results and ideas into print (or at least accepted for publication) before you start telling everyone.  Bragging to a senior professor with a new idea that you think you can prove with some hard work may lead to being scooped.  Well-funded labs can do things amazingly quickly; don’t tell it's unethical and rarely happens.  Get the papers out and go on a speaking tour.  Graduate a student or two.  Let everyone know how productive you are and get an idea how others have advanced the field while you have been busy.  Perhaps there are collaborations to be had?  To quote Professor Griffin again "When opportunity knocks, open the door."  At this point, you are ready for the next round of grant applications.  You may ask for a renewal of your last grant if there are new ideas along the same lines, or if you made discoveries that can lead to exciting extensions of your work.  There may be brand new ideas that you want to pursue.  Funding will be easier if you have demonstrated the ability of do and publish what you said you would do.  This is part of the essence of academic virtue.

Straying from the path.  It is very easy to stray from the virtuous cycle.  One trap at the very beginning is to propose something that is much too big.  Having a broad and impactful overall goal is great, but the initial proposal must be do-able.  Cutting the work into a bite-sized first chunk is a wise move.  The second early trap is recruiting the wrong people.  Going back, once again to Professor Griffin "With good people you can do anything."  But with unsuitable people, life can get rough.  I've heard different ideas about how to spot the right people.  In one philosophy, one wants the people with the best GPA.  These people are supposed to be smarter, or apply themselves better, and they are easier to shift to other funding sources (training grants, for example) than other students.  Still, they might decide to pursue other opportunities, or migrate to another lab.  Another theory is to select the student who gets A's in the subjects you care about (sciences, math) and C's in other subjects.  These focused individuals, when you can find them, may be able to do a great deal in a hurry, but they may also burn out.  My person al philosophy is to find students who are generally interested in the general field, and have a realistic view of their future goals.  If you let them know that you will help them get to their eventual goal, and are reasonably nice to them they will, in my experience, start off well. Raise expectations as their experience grows and you may find you have a great student.

Once the experimentation is underway, there will be a temptation to stray from the initial goal.  While one must always be open to pursuing a more fundamentally problem that is made accessible by your early results, it is very easy (especially if you have trouble focusing generally) to start running all over the field.  Being unable to put together a coherent story makes publication more difficult.    The lack of publications will erode confidence in your ability to produce good work and will hinder the student's progress.  If you discover something particularly interesting, perform enough initial work to get a publication and write a grant application.  It can be a rewarding way to expand, and eventually re-direct your research career.  If the diversion is not significantly more interesting than your original proposal, don't let it bog you down.  Finally, issues about publication need to be addressed.  It is easy to expect your students or postdocs to write all of the manuscripts.  While they need to learn about writing, many are not skilled in English and the Department generally lacks the resources to help them.  If you do not have the time to write the manuscripts and get them through the publication process yourself, you may consider hiring a writer to help.  It's that important.

I came across a grant application from a Professor who was asking for his second 5-year extension.  The progress report publication list from his first renewal contained 42 publications between 2006 and 2011.  Many of them were patent applications, and many were in minor journals, but there was one in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, and a couple in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.  He was asking for three people (two postdocs and a graduate student) within a modular budget ($250K/year for 5 years).  Although I didn’t think the new research he proposed was going to reshape the world, it was well-written, do-able, and he was the right guy to get it done.  I bet he gets it.