How to Write a REALLY Bad Grant Application (and Other Helpful Advice For Scientists)
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The “Background and Significance” Section
This is where you sell your ideas to the reviewers. It is one of the most important sections. If you don’t convince them that your proposal is important, it won’t matter if you’ve tons of preliminary data and well designed experiments. Many people overlook the fact that this section is also the “Significance” and not just “Background.” Some background is essential. You should briefly explain what is known. The reviewers will greatly appreciate it if you keep it brief and focused on the application, rather than spewing out random facts. Enough detail should be given so that the reviewers will understand your application. Usually at least one reviewer, and sometimes all of them, is outside your field. A succinct review of your field is essential. On occasion, reviewers will criticize an application for not proposing to do an obvious experiment that’s already been done. While many people react to this by complaining about the reviewer’s ignorance, chances are that this background information wasn’t described in the application and so the reviewers were just reacting to what they read (as well as being ignorant). Few reviewers have the time to spend hours in the library, and it really helps to have a well written background section. Alternatively, if one or more of the reviewers are very familiar with your field, this section is where you convince them that you also know your stuff. Appropriate references are critical. If the reviewers have published anything on the subject, they will probably consider their paper to be a key contribution to the field and expect it to be cited. Don’t stretch this too far though.
It’s often helpful to show a model of your system with a few question marks on those points that will be addressed in your proposed experiments. To write a bad application, show a model that you think looks really cool, even though it’s unrelated to what you’re proposing. For a good application, explain why your proposed experiments are such an obvious and important extension of your preliminary studies, that they (the reviewers) would have to be pond scum to give your application an unfundable score (but don’t use the term “pond scum” unless that’s really what you’re studying). For example, a good format is “x is known, and y is known, but the key study that will put x and y together, thus curing all human disease, has not yet been done.” Of course, you have to then propose to do this key study.
Bad Example
A bad application uses the “Everest” approach (people climb mount Everest “because it’s there”): We have previously isolated and sequenced a particular protein from human, rabbit, sheep, rat, mouse, gerbil, duck, chicken, frog, zebrafish, Drosophila, Aplysia, and yeast, but we haven’t yet done this for hamster.
Worse Example: The “random information” approach.
Proteins are made of amino acids. Amino acids are made of elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur. Elements are made up of subatomic particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. Electrons, protons and neutrons are made up of quarks such as up, down, top, bottom, sleepy, and grumpy. E=mc2. The rain in
Good Example (guaranteed to work):
The toxin isolated from the Asian Pygmy Cobra is the deadliest poison known. It is rapidly absorbed through the skin and then slowly affects the nervous system, causing an extremely painful death approximately five years after ingestion. Surprisingly, little is known about the specific mechanism of action of the toxin, which is essential for the development of an antidote. Our proposed research on the Asian Pygmy Cobra toxin will reveal the mechanism of action and lead to the development of an antidote. This research is especially timely as the grant application you are reading has been impregnated with the toxin and by the time you’ve read this page, you have received a lethal dose. Your only chance of avoidi
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About the Book
Many people think that they do not need a book on “how to write a really bad grant application” - they already know how. Actually, this book is intended as a guide to writing grant applications that will get funded. One way to write a good grant application is to avoid writing a bad one. This book analyzes “bad” scientific grant applications from a humorous perspective. There are also some sections on obtaining funding from private foundations and industry, and a few parts that are pure silliness. All pieces in this book are original and are either fiction (the humor pieces) or non-fiction (the serious advice). The reader will hopefully be able to tell the two apart.
About the Author
Lloyd Fricker has written several bad grant applications, and thus is an expert on the subject. He has also written a number of applications that received “outstanding” scores and were funded by the National Institutes of Health, private foundations, and companies. He served for many years as a reviewer for NIH and other public and private funding agencies. In addition to his serious scientific publications, Lloyd Fricker has published several dozen humor articles in a variety of journals (Annals of Improbable Research, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and many others); some of these articles have been widely circulated on the internet. When not writing humor, the author is a Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.