Biomedical Grant

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As a researcher of this contemporary, the request for grants is a forefront challenge due to its scarcity. This is partly because grants are essential to run an experiment yet they are a limited source. Understandably, the competitiveness is eminent to maximise the use of the fund so the money is awarded and prioritised to researchers with the most promising projects. Since the establishment of these government funding bodies, the process is highly regulated to ensure a fair assessment of the worth of a scientific proposal. However, two years ago Australian Research Council’s financial support for biomedical research came to an end. Now with only one primary public sector to distribute the grant, competition and fail rate soared amid the rise …show more content…

Experiments are a high-cost practice, which scientists must cover the expenses that are required to run experiments and as a result, biomedical researchers heavily invest their time to receive an endowment from external sources and many invariably aim for governmental funding schemes such as the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). The fund covers the payments for equipment, consumables, and maintenance. Biomedical researchers are often restricted to find alternative ways to reduce their expenditure and thus, are subject to aligning to the grant scheme. Although they could reduce the cost by developing their own cells or antibodies, the biological variations prevent such practice as it interferes with the reproducibility. Even publication companies now ask scientists to be accountable by making their research reproducible so their application form consists of listing already registered antibodies. With the cost of a batch of antibodies as high as a million dollars, scientists struggle to buy them with their own salaries. Furthermore, research does not generate money quickly or adequately to allow self-funding. This means that only external sources can invest to conduct high-cost …show more content…

Private institutions such as Google and Johnston & Johnston do financially support research, yet the prestige and preference remained with governmental grants. It is because the public funding institutions do not expect shares from the profit made from its funded research. The funding bodies also do not manipulate or purposefully direct politics behind scientific findings (“National Principles of Intellectual Property”, 2015). They merely encourage receivers to publish papers of research that are reproducible and peer-reviewed as their end goal of utilising the grant. Researchers receive many benefits from this arrangement as they can ascend their profession with their contribution to science through publications. However, the same arrangement does not necessarily apply to private sector research funds. Upholding different interest to that of the researchers, industries may urge scientists to align with the focus of the company, share profits made from commercialisation, have their works regulated. A statistician, William Sealy Gosset, had to have his work published under the pseudonym of ‘Student’ because the company he worked for had different values to his experiment and its findings. Guinness brewery where Gosset was employed prohibited any publication from its workers to avoid associations with the company. It will be

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