Newsletter
Volume 28 | 2005 | Number 2
Getting Grants from the National Institutes of
Health
Howard Rachlin, Ph.D., SUNY at Stonybrook
I must start with a few caveats. Although I have had good
success in getting research grants from the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), I'm not sure whether the rules and principles that
I've developed for myself over the years apply to anyone else; I am
especially leery about whether they apply to younger researchers. I
applied (successfully) for my first grant (from the National
Science Foundation) even before I was out of graduate school and
since then my research has been continuously funded by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) and (from about 1985) by NIH. What I know
best, therefore, is how to keep a grant rather than how to get one
in the first place. Nevertheless, I have been on grant committees
(both NSF and NIH) on and off for many years, so I do have some
advice to offer even to new applicants.
General
Keep in mind that all this hard work of
writing you're doing will be read by only three or four people,
each of whom will be overwhelmed with other proposals. Your job is
to keep those three or four people interested, even entertained.
The names of panel members are public information. You should find
out who they are and try to guess which one will be most likely to
review your application (your prior collaborators and colleagues
from your university cannot be reviewers and will have to leave the
room when your proposal is being discussed) and write with him or
her in mind. Not that your guess will be correct, but this will
help focus your thinking. You should spend as much effort in
polishing your prose style as you would if this were your Nobel
Prize acceptance speech.
Reviewers will certainly want to see details of proposed
experiments. Nevertheless, and I can't stress this too strongly, do
not violate the space or type size or margin limitations. Do not
make the application look like you are trying to cram as much as
you possibly can into it. Your figures should be big and clear
enough to be easily read. Use diagrams wherever possible to
illustrate procedures. Leave an extra space between paragraphs. Use
plenty of headings and keep them in logical order. Don't assume
that the reviewers are familiar with your work (even if you know
that they are). Explain everything. Don't worry about repeating
some complex idea or procedure. It's much better to repeat yourself
than to force the reader to turn back 10 or 20 pages to discover
what you're talking about.
Never praise your own research. Don't tell them how interesting
some result is - but make them interested. Never denigrate the
research of anyone else. If your research is clearly relevant to
practical NIH concerns (autism, say) there's no need to keep
telling them how relevant it is. However, if your research is
highly abstract or theoretical (like mine) you've got to present a
convincing path to its application. This has become more and more
important in recent years. If you can't do this you're better off
applying to NSF. (In the good old days you could apply to both
simultaneously; I switched to NIH when NSF rejected a reapplication
and NIH gave the very same application a high score.)
Very frequently, applications are rejected on the first try or
the second (you have three swings of the bat on a given
application). When this happens (I don't say "if" since it will
eventually happen to everyone) you must assume that it's your
fault. The reviewers are always right. If two reviews are
contradictory in their suggestions you've got to find a (Hegelian)
resolution between them that takes both into account. There's a
strong tendency for reviewers to dig in their heels in a second
submission unless their concerns are a) admitted to be valid, b)
specifically addressed, and c) effectively answered.
In general, do not try to hide any weaknesses in your
application. You don't want to make the application a game of find
the flaw. Reviewers come to be pretty good at this. It is much
better to address weaknesses. It might be possible, in fact, to
make weaknesses into strengths by suggesting that they were
inevitable given the limited time you have been working on the
problem (i.e., your prior experiments were essentially pilot or
control experiments for this very proposal) and that the further
research you're proposing will clear it all up.
Applying for the First Time
As unfair as it may seem, you can't even get
a first grant without a proven record of publication. This could be
your thesis work or postdoc work or work supported by a university.
A record of publication in highly selective journals, preferably as
first author, in the very area of the application, is necessary
(but not sufficient) for funding. If this happens not to be the
case, to have any chance at all, you've got to address the issue
and somehow explain it. If you can't do this then you might try to
get some seed money from your university before applying.
Continuation
Unless you're absolutely sure that you have a
great new idea that will definitely appeal to the committee, stick
to the topic that got you your grant in the first place. Don't even
change the title. The watchword is continuation. You want to
continue doing what you were doing before. There should be a
seamless web between the research you've already done (in the
progress report) and the research you intend to do. A good idea is
to back up a little and actually put some of your work in progress
into the proposed research section - although if you have any
interesting unpublished data they should definitely go into the
progress report, perhaps as pilot experiments. I know what Sidman
says about pilot experiments. Nevertheless, some experiments don't
stand by themselves but are just the first phase in a sequence and
need further elaboration in a second phase for them to make sense.
(The grant proposal should be written as if you are at that moment
on the very cusp between these two phases.)
Idiosyncrasies
I'm not in favor of collaborative grant
proposals or big projects with tons of investigators - just more
things for reviewers to find fault with. I prefer working with a
few graduate students in a small laboratory. Nevertheless, I have
sometimes added consultants in areas where I am weak. For instance
someone like me will need statistical help in experiments of
complex design or the help of a clinician in applied
experiments.
My own preference is to have one grant for all of my research.
My laboratory uses both human and nonhuman subjects in a wide
variety of experimental settings. A single NIH grant supports them
all. That way, my proposal holds nothing back; it contains all the
ideas I think are good. At an early point, in the background
section, I explain how human and nonhuman experiments each
reinforce the meaningfulness of the other. I tell them (in truth)
that my graduate students are required to be active in both human
and nonhuman research. I present both past and proposed experiments
by topic rather than by species of subject. This sort of division I
have found makes sense both to me and to the reviewers. But of
course many highly successful researchers do things
differently.