Funding for science

It's been a crazy few weeks with all sorts of major funding applications due. It's like an addiction really. The reward rate is very low but when they come, the rewards are high, tangible, brilliant. So we keep going back for more, year in and year out.

So I've done the annual begging and sent myself to the slaughter. My track record remains a bit of a shambles but it's hard to convince male professors that it is a valid choice to want babies and an academic career. It's just hard to do both all at once, particularly since one's most productive post-doc years tend to co-incide with the old tick-tock that biology so kindly throws into the equation. Will I get funded? Almost certainly not. Will I keep trying? Absolutely.

This of course has all taken on a new perspective of late, given that the status of my position will now have a far more direct effect upon others around me. If I don't have funding then my group ceases to exist. Which is ironic, because if I agreed to move with my current boss then I would have guaranteed funding for at least five years. Perhaps my placenta head has never recovered, because that's (objectively at least) really poor decision-making! Lucky we scientists like a challenge...