Have you ever seen Black Hawk helicopters fly above the ɬŔď·¬ campus? Me neither. Yet, there is a persistent conspiracy theory that might as well invoke their presence.
Because our Office regularly portrays vaccines as effective and safe—not 100% safe, because nothing is—those who deny their worth need to explain why we’re so “wrong.” It turns out that one professor on campus once received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates funds vaccine research and distribution: ergo, our Office is in the pocket of Bill Gates. How is this enforced? I imagine that Black Hawk helicopters must have circled campus the day the grant was approved, with military personnel rappelling down, knocking on doors, and handing thousands of staff members and professors our new vaccine talking points.
Without understanding how research is financed, this theory is actually appealing to a lot of people, and it may make these same people crack a smile when they see the Trump regime hacking and slashing at science funding in the United States.
But receiving research financing is far from lazily applying for government handouts; it’s a core activity of a scientist’s life, and the success rates are low.
What a grant proposal looks like
Science costs money, and it’s not just because silly human beings need salaries. Each time an experiment in, let’s say, molecular biology is performed, reagents get consumed, meaning enzymes, buffers, stains, molecular building blocks, and more. And these reagents don’t float in the air; they require consumables like plastic tubes and pipet tips, and scientists need disposable gloves to avoid contaminating their solutions or inadvertently transferring enzymes from their skin into tubes where they will destroy the RNA they’re trying to isolate. (I will be focusing on the biomedical sciences, as this is what I’m most familiar with.)
Sometimes, new equipment needs to be purchased as well: centrifuges, vortex mixers, machines that amplify DNA, micropipettes, and even simple things like plastic racks to hold tubes in place. There’s also a line in any research budget for overheads, to which we will return.
The basic process for the head of a laboratory—commonly referred to as the principal investigator or P.I., no relation to —to ask for money is to write a grant proposal. Typical grants last a few years: a recent competition held by Canada’s largest public funder of health research, CIHR, conferred grants of an average duration of . And applying for this money is a lengthy, arduous exercise that, for major grants, often takes to plan, execute, and submit.
The grant proposal can itself be preceded by a letter of intent, where the P.I. submits a summary of what they plan to do and the collaborators they have assembled for the project. If the letter is accepted, the massive document that is the grant proposal begins to be created. Everyone with a major role to play in this proposed research has to list their past publications, degrees, and awards—essentially, they must convince the evaluators that they are the right people for the job. The P.I. will also write a long explanation of what we know about the topic and what has led to the burning research question they want to answer. For a grant proposal on studying how two key proteins interact in people who have a particular type of skin cancer, for example, this introduction would cover important statistics about skin cancer in general and this type of cancer specifically; the underlying biological mechanism that lead to this type of skin cancer; what is known about each one of these key proteins and the systems or signalling cascades they are part of; and how they are tied to skin cancer. And every single claim needs to be adequately referenced.
The researchers’ hypothesis has to be spelled out, alongside a detailed description of the specific experiments they want to carry out: the techniques to be used, the samples to be tested, the controls to be included. This needs to be justified as being part of the P.I.’s overarching research program, and a budget has to be included detailing where the money would go in terms of salaries, consumables, reagents, equipment, and overheads. Different granting agencies have specific requirements and templates to be used, so additional documents often have to be filled out.
Writing a grant proposal is thus a giant effort in literature research, academic writing, and coordination, articulated over months.
The granting agency will then convene a panel of scientists to grade the proposals it has received, since it typically doesn’t have the money to approve them all. Reviewers thus have to pour over these proposals—as unpaid labour, I should point out—and ask themselves important questions. Is the rationale sound? Are the objectives well defined and the methods appropriate? Are the researchers likely to finish the project in time? Have they identified likely challenges and do they propose solutions to them? Is the institution where this will take place well equipped to carry out this project?
These evaluations are done by people, and people are flawed. Moreover, two grant proposals may end up in a tie. Which one should get the money? Since the late 1990s, the idea of has been put forward, either as a complete replacement for people manually evaluating grant proposals or as an add-on to the process, where proposals that pass evaluation are put into a basket to determine the winners, or where ties are broken by the use of chance. Partial lottery systems are still rare and there is a lack of consensus on whether or not they ultimately benefit scientists (and the public, whose trust is predicated on the system being perceived as fair).
So, what are the chances of getting funded? When we look at the numbers coming out of major North American granting agencies, we get a sobering lesson: research is very competitive. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, success rates for applications to the NIH (the United States’ largest federal fund for health research) hovered , meaning that a little under one in three applications was funded. Since then, rates have gone down to 20%, meaning one in five. In Canada, the equivalent CIHR has seen a comparable decline in its percentage of funded applications: from 33% in 2000 to in recent years.
Getting your research financed through public agencies has always been hard. Under Trump’s kakistocratic regime, things are about to worsen.
The decimation of the world’s biggest health research funding body
A leaked budget for the fiscal year starting this October reveals that the White House wants to chop the NIH’s budget from about 47 billion dollars down to . Already, the NIH has cancelled hundreds of active research grants—money it had accepted to disburse to researchers prior to Trump’s re-election and which it is now cutting off. An published by the journal Nature revealed that, as of April 7, 29% of NIH grants related to HIV/AIDS had seen their federal financing revoked. Half of all grants which mentioned LGBT issues had been cancelled, as well as nearly half of grants that alluded to vaccine hesitancy.
In the name of right-wing ideology, NIH grants to in Trump’s crosshairs have allegedly been withheld in a possible attempt to pressure these universities into abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The sudden cancellation of on-going grants has led a group of scientists to , while many researchers take to the media to remind the public that the NIH is the world’s biggest funder of biomedical research by a wide margin: in 2022, it doled out in grants, followed in second place by the London-based charity Wellcome with 1.2 billion US dollars. Zooming in on HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria—major infectious killers worldwide—the NIH gave out 1.4 billion US dollars for their research in 2023. In second place? The Gates Foundation, with half of a billion dollars. The private sector simply does not measure up.
Which is not to say that nonprofits and foundations don’t play a role in funding research. In fact, academics are more and more encouraged to partner with private organizations to help finance their projects. But these organizations—which funded most research in the U.S. prior to the Second World War—tend to be very selective in what they want to put money into, and if a project has no immediate commercialization prospect, its P.I. will likely be told “no.”
What’s more, private funders typically do not give money for overheads, and the NIH’s coverage of overheads has also been slashed from 40% of the total budget being submitted to . Also known as indirect costs, overheads acknowledge that a scientist’s laboratory does not exist in a vacuum. Research centres have clerical and administrative staff, as well as fiscal managers and directors. They have computers and printers, and they use up electricity and running water. Like any building, they sometimes have to be renovated and their grounds have to be maintained.
Moreover, they offer core services that multiple researchers end up using. As a grad student and later research assistant, I had access to centralized facilities that could sort cells for me, or do mass spectrometry, or do whole-genome sequencing. These instruments cost a fortune and they require trained scientists to run them and diagnose errors. It doesn’t make sense for each lab to have them, so they are typically shared as core facilities. Overheads pay for that, too.
Biomedical research is not the only discipline being drawn and quartered. The has likewise capped its allowable overhead coverage for research projects at 15%; the sees its proposed budget hampered by 1.6 billion dollars; and the has terminated over 1,000 grants in the span of two weeks, including grants on misinformation research, while its director resigned.
Research in Trump World is a red number on a spreadsheet, but in fact research enriches a country. A report from a coalition of major research institutions, patient and health advocates, and private industry shows that for every dollar invested in research by the NIH, a little over are generated in economic activity. Research creates jobs and innovation, and not just in the United States.
This relentless gutting of the largest financial engine of health research is affecting patients, too. approved in the United States (and presumably worldwide) in the last decade received money from the NIH for their research. Now, a quarter of cancer researchers surveyed by the American Association for Cancer Research are saying the clinical trials they are running—where new interventions that show promise in the lab are being given to patients—are being due to the NIH cutbacks. Even if this were suddenly reversed, trials cannot be restarted easily: stock goes bad, patients wander away, and researchers shift their focus.
In Portugal, research investments dropped in 2011: by 2014, nearly were contemplating leaving the country for greener pastures. A Nature poll of over 1,200 U.S. scientists revealed that were now considering moving elsewhere. Canada is rolling out the welcome mat, but our investments in research pale in comparison to the United States of just a few years ago. In 2021, gross domestic expenditures on research and development in the United States totaled ; in Canada, that number was . That’s an order of magnitude difference.
We want American scientists in exile to thrive here, but given how competitive research grants already are within Canada, my question is who will fund them?
