This a funding myth. There are no untapped wells of charity money that can support the kind of research biomedical scientists need to perform today. Most foundation grants are in 25 to 75K/year range, many are on the order of 1-3 years, and in spite of this, are highly competitive. - ThreadSky

azfaust.bsky.social • 26 days ago

This a funding myth.

There are no untapped wells of charity money that can support the kind of research biomedical scientists need to perform today. Most foundation grants are in 25 to 75K/year range, many are on the order of 1-3 years, and in spite of this, are highly competitive.

Reposted from Drug Monkey

Institutions “encouraging their PIs to seek alternate funding” do not seem to understand we’ve been doing that for two bloody decades. It’s not like we’ve been leaving stones unturned and can now find a ton of undisturbed grubs just waiting to feed us!

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resdevbcch.bsky.social•26 days ago

Also those sources rarely fund non-targeted research. It’s not a replacement for sustainable funding for curiosity-driven discovery research.

azfaust.bsky.social•26 days ago

Yeah, I mean, the few that do (I can think of Simmons Foundation), the people in that field, they know about them and already apply to them. There is no pot of mystery, previously untapped funding.

metabodave.bsky.social•26 days ago

Also worth pointing out (before someone inevitably mentions it) that funding from places like the VA has become very difficult and many foundations have eliminated grant funding opportunities. For example, the American Diabetes Association largely withdrew from the game years ago.

azfaust.bsky.social•26 days ago

I'm talking 2 grants out of 100+ applications funded (success rates of 1-2%). Even ACS, which has one of the best foundation grants out there in terms of $ and years frequently passes on top scoring grants because it simply doesn't have enough $.

azfaust.bsky.social•26 days ago

This approach to research funding is the road towards de-progress.

azfaust.bsky.social•26 days ago

If this is your institutional strategy, you need to start firing people today.

azfaust.bsky.social•26 days ago

I'm saying this because at this point, every time I start working with a new team, they go "you know, we would like a list of all these mystery funding opportunities specific to our research." When I was new, I would dive in eagerly only to discover that the ones that mattered, they knew...

azfaust.bsky.social•26 days ago

... and the ones they didn't know, didn't apply to them. At this point, I simply direct them to Pivot or their central offices, and instead urge them to focus on opportunities that are much more likely to be sustainable such as the NIH, NSF, DoD, etc.

azfaust.bsky.social•26 days ago

So if US government is going to kill the very thing that makes their scientific eminence possible - research sustainability - the future of science is no longer here.

shilsons.bsky.social•25 days ago

The prices of reagents in biology are crazy. This was, of course, pre-COVID when I was a lab rat. Now, they must be astronomical. I was wondering if like-minded labs could form a consortium and produce reliable reagents (proteins and enzymes) and share.

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