MRC

Scouting for Geronimo

Linda in Chiricahua National Monument

As many of you know, until a few years ago I volunteered with the Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research (hereafter MRC).  Gradually, however, my enthusiasm for MRC waned, and finally essentially disappeared.  This was owing to the fate of stuff I wrote for the MRC web site – it all vanished without a trace.  Now I find that I don’t know a single MRC staff member, except Saul  Rivkin himself – who has stopped phoning me, as he once did at least weekly.  Oh, well – Saul is getting old.  He’s almost as old as I am, in fact.  Practically antediluvian. 

But MRC still does good work.  It raises money and doles it out to young scientists who they think may be poised on the brink of an important discovery.  They have just announced their grantees for 2018; you can read about it here:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-04/g-trc041018.php

To demonstrate just how petty I can be, I would like to point out that even this press release contains an error.  Over 22 thousand American women contract OVCA yearly, not die from it.  The latter figure is more than 14 thousand – still an obscenely high number.

Anyway, MRC gives out four types of grant:

Pilot Studies:  These support investigations that are non-mainstream – innovative for sure, and perhaps a bit speculative.  In my not-particularly humble opinion, this is where the bulk of MRC money should go.  This year they awarded eleven Pilot Study grants, of $75 K each.

Scientific Scholar awards:  These also appear to be innovative.  Three were awarded this year, at $60 K per.  These seem to be aimed at extremely early-career investigators because grant applicants are required to designate a “mentor”.

Bridging Funding Awards:  Sad but true:  Not all worthy research ideas get funded by NIH or other governmental funding agencies.  Bridging Gtants - $30,000 for up to six months – give the proposer sustenance and encouragement to try again.  Two were awarded this year.

Challenge Grants:  This is a rather funky idea: propose a “grand scientific question to the scientific community”, then award $150,000 to the most promising proposal.  I don’t know what the “grand question” was this year, but – whatever it was – nobody got funded.

MRC, as frustrating as it is, serves one truly vital purpose:  it spurs innovation.  Breakthroughs rarely originate out of old, established research projects – and these, by the way, suck almost all of the oxygen out of available, mainstream, funding sources.  MRC and like organizations enable new ideas to be hatched and incubated.  If the new idea proves to be viable, the likes of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg – or even NIH - can step in and do the heavy fiscal lifting.  But first the idea must exist.

  

So, go get ‘em, MRC.  My next blog will be another in my series “Profiles in Research Excellence”, chosen from your 2018 awardees.  Her name is Pamela.