Grant-writing amnesia

I can’t believe this is happening to me again. I find myself working on a grant when I wasn’t really planning on doing that this month, frantically re-writing and analyzing preliminary data in order to make the best case possible, to convince the NIH to give me funds for a new series of experiments. Why is it always like this? Why, every time I write a grant proposal, does the writing project go down to the wire, even past the deadline? Well, I’ll tell you why — it’s grant writing amnesia. Here’s what happens. In advance of actually writing the grant proposal, everyone in the lab works very hard to gather preliminary data that will demonstrate the feasibility of what the investigator wants to propose. In the US, feasibility is considered an important aspect of a good grant proposal, so this takes a lot of time and effort, both technical and intellectual. Then write, write, write up to the deadline, trying for clarity, brevity, and that elusive component called ‘impact’. Finish writing the proposal, spend a day assembling and copying it and, if you operate like I do, miss the deadline for the express delivery service and find yourself driving to the only all-night post office in the vicinity (which in my case is an hour’s drive away at the Los Angeles International Airport). That night, you collapse from exhaustion. The next day is when the amnesia sets in. The sheer relief of not having to write a grant, on top of your normal workload, leads to a state of euphoria in which you rapidly forget the preceding several weeks, instead marveling at how much free time you seem suddenly to have. You begin to think: This isn’t so bad. Science is fun! I wonder why I’ve been in a bad mood for the past four weeks? And life goes on as normal, until the grant renewal is due. Then the panic sets in and the whole cycle begins again. Why does grant-writing amnesia occur? My theory is that it’s a survival mechanism for investigators who run their labs on extramural grants. I liken it to that old adage about the reason humans continue to reproduce being because women somehow forget the pain of childbirth. I can only conclude that it’s a good thing for us as scientists that grant-writing amnesia exists. It’s probably the only reason my lab continues to be funded.