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Published online 1 April 2009 | Nature 458, 556 (2009) | doi:10.1038/458556a
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Congress probes NIH stimulus funds
Scrutiny also aimed at National Children's Study
Hard on the heels of their $10.4-billion gift to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), members of Congress have made it clear that they will keep close tabs on how the biomedical agency spends the money.
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A BETTER WAY TO USE THE STIMULUS MONEY FOR PROMOTING GREAT SCIENCE AND SUPPORTING GOOD JOBS. I agree that Congress should watch very closely how the stimulus money is used and what will be achieved. In addition, I think, besides to use a large chunk of stimulus money to support the 'grand opportunities' grants aimed at large-scale projects, a small amount of the stimulus money should be used for a revolutionary way of supporting the truly great science that has been under-supported and to allow the greatest scientists to have some descent jobs to do their good work. This revolutionary way of using limited amount of money to support the unlimited success in science can be easily achieved in the following steps: 1. Perform a complete scan (which includes using traditional indexes as well as new searching tools such as Google) over recent scientific discoveries that are doomed to influence future science and benefit society. 2. Identify the true pioneers based on the chronological order of making the discoveries not the impact factor value of the publications describing the same or similar discoveries. 3. Evaluate the situations of these pioneers and obtain their research plans. 4. Publish announcements for obtaining proposals from other researchers on those important research areas. 5. Review the research plans from both the pioneers and the others wishing to do the research in those areas and make a selection for awarding both the originality and the excellence. ///Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com)