The National Institutes of Health has announced the cuts to medical research that will be required by the federal budget sequester. Although the new cuts hurt, the proportion of grant proposals being funded has been dropping for many years. The stunning change in the chart is the increase in the number of proposals over the past decades. Scientific teams and administrators can easily spend hundreds of hours on a single grant proposal. You are looking at many long, long workdays and worknights in those blue bars, most of which were for naught.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-based Community]
