I don't usually ask for things like this, but as others (e.g. Isis and drdrA) have linked, there is a VERY important vote happening this week on the budget that could have a direct impact on labs (and tenure track positions) like mine and yours.

Biomedical research depends on NIH funding from the government, because we can't trust the market and commercial entities to support research and development towards medical treatments and devices that won't bring in short-term profits. They call them "orphan diseases" for a reason: because they are ignored by the industrial science world. As many of you may have read about, my cousin Nora's cancer was extremely rare, with so few patients that pharmaceutical companies just aren't interested in studying it or developing therapies for it. All of the advances made in treating her cancer, many of which she participated in trials for, came from academic research labs or non-commercial institutes.

The NIH also runs many clinical trials for less rare diseases that are too long-term for industry. Without that stepping stone, many groundbreaking treatments for heart disease, genetic diseases and cancers (including common cancers like breast and lung cancer) would not have made it into your hospital or doctor's office. We need NIH funding to keep research labs supported to do the work that underlies the basis for these trials, and to keep the trials themselves flowing to bring these advances into the real world.

On another side of the story, thousands of jobs all over the country depend on NIH funding. Running a research lab is like running a small business: you have to attract investment to support your operation and pay your employees. The NIH is a major source of this investment, and if NIH funding levels are cut, labs like mine will have to lay off employees immediately, as well as halt all growth, because it will be incredibly difficult to get sufficient investment to pay salaries. Since research is not a profit-making enterprise, we have no other options for increasing our working capital. I personally will have to consider laying off staff and/or stopping all growth in my lab, and my own job will be in jeopardy in three years time, because getting significant NIH funding is basically a requirement for getting tenure. If I don't get tenure, I lose my job. And it won't be from lack of trying: in just two and  half years, I have already submitted more than eight grant applications, and they have all gotten very strong reviews from their respective scientific panels--however if there isn't enough money to go around at NIH, it doesn't matter how much the reviewers liked my grant, they just can't fund them all.

Please consider calling your representative today to tell them how you feel about this and what it means to you to keep biomedical research into rare diseases like Nora's funded. Here is a link where you can
enter your zip code and get the information you need to make the call: http://capwiz.com/faseb/callalert/index.tt?alertid=27944501

Thanks for considering it.

I've reviewed grant proposals for NIH a few times now, and despite the widespread availability of grant advice on the internet, many proposals are truly difficult to read and hard to get excited about. I end up feeling like the state of science is incredibly derivative, poorly thought-out and lazily rationaled. But every once in a while, I see one that rises up out of the mediocrity and is just so freaking cool, that I can't wait to see the investigator(s) publish their work from it and it reassures me that I'm not just a crabby old bastard.

So, NIH is paying attention to what goes on out here in the internet. Sally Rockey, NIH's Deputy Director for Extramural Research, has a new blog called "Rock Talk" (love it, lol) perhaps inspired by NIGMS/Jeremy Berg's blogging legacy (and good to have starting up now that he is moving on from director of NIGMS to a new position at a university--maybe she can become our new source of NIH data crack?). In her first post, she talks about NIH's policies on family leave, setting the context in a way that I am pretty sure means she was inspired to clarify this topic by my post from a couple of weeks ago.

To summarize her clarification, she said that while NIAID might be the only institute that has explicitly announced a program for the family leave-related technical assistance supplements, it is not the only institute that allows grant funds to be used to pay for this kind of technical assistance, nor the only one to grant supplements to hire temporary technical assistance for this purpose. Furthermore, she reiterated that NIH allows childcare costs to be budgeted as a fringe benefit or included as an indirect cost to an award.

If I am interpreting this correctly, means that PIs can request or rebudget funds from NIH grants to cover their own childcare costs or those of their trainees/employees supported on those grants, and also that institutions can include such allocations in their indirect cost calculations (and thus reduce the hit to the directs, which would affect the effective grant budget the PI has to work with). I think the latter would be the best arrangement, since it would reduce the potential disincentive to PIs to having their trainees (or themselves) have children that might be perceived if the childcare costs amount was included as a fringe benefit (since fringe benefits are a direct cost). The possibility of removing that budget-squeezing barrier is phenomenal--it could dramatically affect the equation for grad student RAs, postdocs and junior faculty in particular.

One question I still have is if these policies apply to all grants or just training grants. Since the link about these policies is in the "Training" section of the NIH grants website, it isn't clear if they also apply to R, P, U etc. grants. Also, if such a clarification was issued as an official notice, we might be able to get some purchase with our institutions in shifting their own internal policies on how parental leave and childcare costs are charged. For example, my institution does not allow parental leave to be charged to Federal grants beyond the first two weeks, even though with sick leave and parental leave combined, one can conglomerate up to about 12 weeks total of time off after childbirth. That means my department was responsible for covering the salary costs of me being on maternity leave. Lucky for me, my department head and dean are extremely supportive of this and covered it automatically, unconditionally and without laying any pressure on me about it. But there are many environments, even on my own campus that has a major NSF ADVANCE grant, where that would not have been the case. My institution also does not advertise any policy about covering childcare costs, and I bet if I suggested or asked I would just get some funny looks and shaken heads. Like "Hah, yeah right lady, keep dreamin'".

NIH: you have the power to convince our institutions on this, but methinks you'll need to be a little more proactive--and oh, how we would appreciate it if you would do that! It could be a total game-changer!

The title quote, talking about motherhood, came from JLK's blog, which I just spent a minute catching up with upon noticing she's been posting again.

It made me catch my breath with a few tears welling up, because as my daughter turned one a couple of weeks ago, and I've just been revisiting some of those long, LOOOONG early days reading Dr. O's posts, it describes the bittersweetness, oh, so well.

Why is NIAID the only institute that offers the supplement to support postdoctoral fellows to hire a tech to help them with their work while they need to be away from the lab (for e.g. maternity leave, etc.)?

Primary Caregiver Technical Assistance Supplement

NIAID started this in 2004. I know from insider information that the NIH working group to address bias and barriers to women in science talked about this sometime between 2006 and 2008. It's now 2011, and NIAID is still the only institute that makes it available. Let's go, NIGMS, NCI, NHLBI, all the rest of you.

Hey, so, a little bird told me about these tenure-track positions available. One is in Medicinal Chemistry, one is in Pharmacogenomics. If you think your work could in any way be related to pharmacogenomics, you should look at that position! Y'all should check them out. There's also an interesting senior position advertised, too, for an endowed chair in cancer therapeutics. Tell your friends!

Rising up out of the chaos that is my life currently to quote Namnezia again, talking about how important it is to not forget about (and occasionally remind ourselves of) the WHY of the HOW:

This is also true in the lab. Whenever one of my lab peeps comes in complaining that they can’t get something to work, I always tell them to check the original recipe, be it a methods section in a paper, a protocol book or a lab manual. Lab protocols tend to drift over time such that we teak thing here and there to make things work more optimally. But occasionally these tweaks add up over time, such that what we are doing is very different from the original protocol. It also turns out that many of these tweaks are completely unnecessary and just make the whole procedure way more complicated. I mean if you switch a specific incubation time and things suddenly work, are you really going to go back to the old way even if you are not sure that the incubation time had anything to do with your experiment suddenly working? No fucking way. Many of these experimental tweaks and turns basically border on what I call “lab voodoo”, and we just do them because at some point they seemed to help . But by the end, the protocol is so twisted and disfigured that if it stops working it is impossible to troubleshoot. Which is why it helps to go back to the beginning and try again. It also helps to read some old papers. Recently I re-read some not exactly-classic papers, but papers that set the experimental framework in my field and the whole impetus for my research. And there was so much in there that I can’t believe I missed the first time. There are so many unexplored leads, and hidden experimental gems, that after re-reading them I came out with a buttload of new ideas I wanted to try.

Can you see why I love this dude's blog so much?

Quick!!! Help bring these projects past the finish line, there's a special matching deal going on! They aren't for science classes, but that's okay--we like arts and literature, too!