Meera Sundaram

@meera-sundaram.bsky.social

Worms, Tubes, Matrix. In Philly #Celegans #aECM Editor at GENETICS

@peiferlabunc.bsky.socialReposted by @meera-sundaram.bsky.social

Please find 5 minutes today to draft your response to this drastic change in NIH Peer review. The deadline is October 13. I pasted my own response below as an example--please share widely 🧪

I am an NIH-funded scientist who has run a lab for 34 years. I have served on literally dozens of NIH peer-review study sections, most recently this past June. I also have served in Council for both NIGMS and for CSR. I thus am very familiar with the current review process from both the prospective of an applicant and a reviewer. I strongly oppose the proposed changes. While NIH peer review is not perfect, it is the best system thus far devised, and is the envy of colleagues in other countries. Three experts in the field spend hours reviewing each proposal, using their knowledge of important issues to rank proposals by signficance, feasibility and impact. Then they present their opinions to a panel of 20 or more expert sin the broader field, and a spirited discussion ensues. Thus each proposal is put through very stringent process, and the resulting ranking has substantial value in times when funding is limited. Having review many times, I know that the proposed binning would provide equal "scores" to proposals that were greet with substanailly different degrees of enthusiasm. Further, grants binned just bowl and just above the 25% cutoff would be subsequently viewed as if the enthusiasm for them quite divergent, certainly not an accurate summary. The current fine-grained system avoids these issues. Removing it will make the task of NIH Program officers more difficult. Binning also allows non-scientific issues to take on disproportionate weight in funding, an issue that will be accentuated if political appointees are making the ultimate decisions. Please retain the current system.