For the MRC do those submitting proposals know who will be scoring their work in advance, i.e. do those on the panel sit for a fixed term? From the comments above it all sounds a little cloak and dagger.
The usual situation for biomedical projects is that they are sent out for review to independent experts. The panel will be known but their job is just to try to come to some sort of consensus view based on the referees' reports. If all the referees agree it is easy. If not then the job is to try to understand which of the referees is giving a more cogent analysis.
The referees are likely to be chosen by the committee chair or a sub-chair dealing with a particular topic. It may be possible to guess which referees will be chosen, but mostly it will just reflect who is high profile in the field.
Applicants are often asked to suggest one or two referees. That ensures that if their work is very original or specialised then one or two of what may be very few people who appreciate the value of the project get a chance to say why it is good. This is a major reason why it is possible to get scores out of 6 of 5,5,2,2,3,2. However, the referees picked by the applicant may be as blind as the applicant to basic flaws in the project. Sadly, my impression is that in the last twenty years biomedical science has largely been taken over by people who do not understand basic flaws in projects and so everyone is wasting their time on meaningless trends.
There is no doubt that the system is full of people with vested interests jockeying to push each other out - it stinks. But people are like that and the bad odour of the system is not necessarily the reason why projects fail. It may be that they are flawed.
I understand people's enthusiasm for projects that sound positive. However, we need to be sure that researchers are not making simple methodological or theoretical errors of the sort we have seen in clinical trials. Comments made by Jonathan Kerr recently indicate to me that he does not have the necessary critical approach. He makes claims that appear to be quite unsubstantiated. Sadly, that applies to a number of other people in the ME research community.
We do not want money wasted on projects built on sand. On the other hand if a project has some underlying merit and can be steered along a methodologically rigorous course it is worth giving it full support. That is basically what happened with the Rituximab story. The initial findings were weak but could have been important. The project was taken forward in a watertight way and the right answer was obtained. I would like to see something similar happen for the metabolic work. Preliminary findings may be important. But they need firming up before pouring large sums of money in.
It is certainly a pity that Morten put this application in right in the middle of the finalisation of the long and complicated process set up by CMRC for the genomic studies. I have reservations about researchers forming cartels but this is now the second time that two applications have collided in the UK ME community (last time Wellcome applications).
