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On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, [iso-8859-1] Alessandro Esposito wrote:

> [snip]
> Therefore I am ciritc to the peer-review for funding. I started only
> recently to write grants and it is a ridicolous world. When a funding
> agency (practically) asks to predict your future findings, to predict that
> you will save the world from a disease or a natural catastroph, the system
> becomes morally corrupted at the source. ok, sorry, I am going away from
> the point, but I want to make another example.
>
> A group leader has 10 PhD students on the same project and want to publish
> only on Nature. Who will be the first author of that nature paper? Or the
> honest and genius student, or the lucky one, or the one that makes of any
> autofluorescence a good GFP signal. Of that 10 students, the one that cheat
> will be awarded, the genius one will go ahead anyway, and it does not
> matter if the other 8 are good or bad, they are out from science. The group
> leader will publish his Nature, that it will grant a part of the money to
> get other 10 PhD students and make carrier...
>
> When after 10 years the paper will be retracted by the senior author now
> dean of the university) accusing the PhD student or young post-doc to have
> caused the problem, all will be fairly fixed, will be?
>

Heh.  I *almost* feel your pain.  That's why I chose not to go into
academics.  I remember when I was a student at Oklahoma University (go
Sooners!), we had Paul Berg come over from Stanford and give a mini-course
as part of some sort of scholar-leadership program.  This was not too
long after the Asilomar conference, and the mini-course was on ethics
in scientific research with respect to the threat of novel organisms
created by wacky scientists (which was quite a hysteria back in
the late 70s).

Over the time of that course, Dr. Berg and I hit it off (though I doubt
he even remembers me from 30 years ago).  He strongly discouraged me
from going to medical school and encouraged me to go to grad school,
but after watching my professors kill themselves every year or so for
grants, I decided I didn't want to live by the skin of my teeth like that.

Later, after med school, I *did* end up in grad school, though mostly
for fun.  I remember my mentor, Steve Pizer at UNC, killing himself
*all the time* writing grants.  It seemed that he spent more time
writing grants than doing fun work.  I remember the most that after
15 or 20 years of exemplary work, he ended up not getting some big
grant renewed, and had to spend a couple of years scrambling like 
a post-doc to keep his program running.  Everything turned out OK
in the end, but it was rough for a little while, particularly when
he had a gaggle of PhD students depending on him.

I have a lot of respect for academics who are willing to fight those
battles.  I was not.

On the other hand, I have also been on a few panels and advised a 
few that were handing out grants, and I have to say that in none 
of those were folk as capricious as you imply.  Yes, there is a 
prejudice for people with a proven track record, but they've earned
it.  That's what track records mean.  The folk I have seen on
grant panels take their mandates very seriously, and try to 
do their best.  I don't think that any *other* group would do
any better (though it would be interesting to try funding by
lottery for awhile and see if the results are like stock 
picking -- random works just about as well as most systems).

And there are grants specifically for new folk and specifically for 
unproven work.  Often they aren't very big, and the bureaucracy is 
crazy.  But they are there, and they are there to help younger
folk who are starting out and folk with wacky ideas that just
might work.

The latter seems to be better funded in industry, however.  Personally,
I am much more in favor of privately-funded research as opposed to
government-funded research, specifically for that reason, though the
academic prejudice is that we should have a one-payer system nowadays.
I think folk forget that political and bureaucratic agendas can be
just as damaging as commercial ones. The idea that people pander to
commercial granting agencies but do not pander to governmental ones is
a little naive, and addresses a political orientation more than
a real world concern.

billo
http://www.billoblog.com/billoblog