I am writing a couple of grants at the moment. For those of you who are not familiar with how scientific research works, scientists need to apply for funding for their experiments and they do this by applying for grants from various funding agencies. The biggest in Australia for medical research is the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), or alternatively the Australian Research Council (ARC) if you do any other sort of research. In addition to these two governmental bodies there are a series of smaller funding agencies, charities or research foundations that also offer grants for research. The one I am writing at the moment is for a grant from Parkinson’s NSW. I am working on what causes Parkinson’s disease since there is so little work done on this. People have been working on Parkinson’s disease for almost 200 years and we still don’t know what causes it. Now if you have been examining something for almost 200 years and you still don’t know what causes it then chances are what ever it is you are looking at is not it. Sadly young researchers with the new ideas rarely get the grants. Ideas that are new and untried are really difficult to get funding bodies interested in. Since money is very hard to come by, funding bodies are reluctant to take a risk on something no one knows anything about, so they tend to fund what is an accepted part of Parkinson’s disease. Unfortunately, when the accepted field is not the correct one it means you keep flogging a dead horse and there is no real chance that he might get up.

In recent years there has been the trickle of evidence coming out looking into a new mechanism which hasn’t really been looked at before where by a small protein of unknown function called alpha synuclein can cause the pathologies associated with Parkinson’s disease to spread around the brain. So I have designed some experiments to look into this in more detail. They are very sexy and will be hugely important if the questions I am testing turn out to be true. Lets just hope I can convince some funding body to give me a grant now and try some things that haven’t been done before instead of the same old tired stuff that has. Usually people just toe the party line and look at what is accepted so that they can get grants to do more work on what is accepted. Unfortunately for me I am still young and excited enough about research, and have enough creativity to come up with completely new ideas to try to sort out long standing problems. Of course this means I don’t get any grants, but as I say I am still young enough to stand up for what I think is right and design good experiments into new things. That’s what science is all about I think.

It is my ultimate goal of course to set up my own research fund which will give me the intellectual freedom to pursue a problem in what ever direction I need to in order to solve it, not in what ever direction you need to in order to get the next grant, which sadly enough is often not the same direction. This is the idea behind the AEReS project described elsewhere on these pages. One I am still pursuing, but it is a little slower than I had anticipated. I will give an up date on this in a separate post.

Back to work…Bye for now.