It’s time for a National Institute of Surgery

We fund what we care about (and we care about what we fund)

Last week, I got the forty-second grant rejection of my academic career. This puts my overall grant success rate at about 10%. In other words, for every ten grants I write, nine get rejected.

What follows isn’t a sob story about rejection, however. Rejection is part of the academic game.

What follows, instead, is a look at this academic game from the perspective of a surgeon who works in—and writes…