At 9:25 p.m. on Wednesday 15 October 2008, Jill Rafael-Fortney sat down at her home-office computer and wrote an e-mail to Michael Ostrowski, the chair of her department at Ohio State University in Columbus. Mike, I didn't get either of my grants. I just found out about the second one a few minutes ago. My career in research seems to be over. It is all I ever planned to do from the age of six, so I don't really have another well thought-out plan. Can we talk tomorrow? Rafael-Fortney had tried, and failed, to renew the R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that supported her work on mouse models of muscular dystrophy. She had tried, and failed, to get a new R01 grant to study a genetic abnormality that might be widespread in human heart failure. At nearly 39, she had run out of track. Four months earlier, at 4:00 a.m. on 10 June, Darcy Kelley had opened her laptop and logged onto the NIH's grant-review website to find out whether her own R01 application had made it through. For Kelley, a 59-year-old professor at Columbia University in New York, it was her third and final attempt to renew the major grant that supported her studies of the brain circuitry that produces and decodes sounds. She knew the results should be posted any day - and she could not sleep.
展开▼
