Blogger DrugMonkey wrote that in March of 2009, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council proposed and later instituted a new grant application system in which researchers are banned from applying for research funding for 12 months if they've had three or more proposals ranked in the bottom half of a funding prioritization list during the past two years, or have had less than 25 percent of the proposals funded in that time. The Nature News Blog reported that grant applications in the UK are down from about 5,000 a year in the 2005-2006 cycle to less than 3,000 in the 2010-2011 cycle, and success rates are actually up. S. Pelech comments that if fewer investigators submit grant applications, then of course success rates would appear higher, even though less grant proposals are actually funded. He concludes that agencies should just award more grants with slightly lower than average budgets, and leave it to the investigators to prudently use these funds as they see most fit. Read More...

Tags: Grant Funding

Daniele Fanelli at the University of Edinburgh examined more than 4,600 scientific papers published between 1990 and 2007, and found "a steady decline in studies in which the findings contradicted scientific hypotheses." During those 17 years, positive results increased from around 70 percent in 1990 to about 86 percent in 2007, and she speculates that the growing pressure to report only positive results may lead to a "decline" in scientific research around the world. S. Pelech observes that with the rapid progress made in the biological sciences with improved tools and techniques over the last few decades, it is not surprising that our knowledge about the world is becoming increasingly extensive. Nevertheless, it is striking that with around 23,000 proteins encoded by the human genome, it appears that over 95% of the biochemistry/molecular biology publications arise from less than 5% of these proteins. It would seem likely then that there is in fact a high degree of redundancy in scientific publications, which contributes to a very high rate of positive results. Read More...

Tags: Publication, Research Bias

Blogger Morgan Giddings at the Naturally Selected blog is concerned that with the emphasis at many universities these days on fast "translation," it seems that the whole endeavor has lost sight of the fact that all innovation and science takes time. She noted that there are several problems that make universities poorly equipped to reach the goal of fast translation — problems like bureaucracy, science by committee, and the "mixed mission" of a university that requires it to play a large array of roles. S. Pelech acknowledges that government organizations and the general public expect academic university-based researchers to improve the translation of their research into economically useful outcomes, but the current grant-funding system does not really facilitate innovative research, and government laboratories and universities often actively discourage their faculty from starting or working with commercial enterprises. Read More...

Tags: Innovation, Translational research, Scientific impact

Blogger Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket wrote that while antibiotic resistance is a problem for modern medicine, antibiotic resistance was developed by bacteria at least tens of thousands of years ago, long before antibiotics came about. Researchers from McMaster University found bacteria in 30,000-year-old frozen soil samples that feature a wide variety of antibiotic resistance genes against modern drugs such as tetracyclines and vancomycin. S. Pelech comments that in the battle for survival, all organisms have apparently developed mechanisms to detoxify compounds that are found in their environments. For example, our livers provide essential protection against diverse and even new compounds in the natural and processed foods that we take for granted in our diet. Read More...

Tags: Antibiotic Resistance