Sir

Your News Feature “The nightmare before funding” (Nature 437, 308–311; 2005), on the horrors of writing grant applications, will strike a chord with researchers everywhere.

To my knowledge there has never been any objective analysis to determine whether or not increasing the complexity in the funding process has improved decision-making by the funding agencies or produced higher-quality research from the recipients of the funds. The only outcome of which we can be certain is that the wasted time makes grant-writers less productive. This in turn means that, for those agencies that burden us with this administrative nonsense, the science base is less competitive. I know this because, in order to keep my own research group running on a relatively modest scale, I have not been able to do an experiment for five years, and I am certainly not alone.

The pessimistic view is that we are now too bogged down in this mess ever to return to a simpler, more sensible way of doing things. I tell my PhD students that the allure of research used to be the intellectual challenge, but nowadays you'd better be up for the administrative challenge too.