There is little doubt that both the grant and peer review system for publishing papers are broken because of the abuse of power and the lack of recourse by the victims. The present economic crisis is the result of not enforcing existing regulations, an enormous abuse of power that continues because the same people who caused the breakdown are still in power.

The remedies suggested by others do not really address the problems discussed by Peter Lawrence. Of the proposals in Box 2, the best is by Ross Cagan, which is a somewhat weaker version of what was proposed nearly a decade ago by Rita Colwell, the most courageous Director of the US National Science Foundation. She called the grant application system based on frequent research proposals an enormous waste of time and money. She advocated 5-year grants given automatically to investigators starting their careers, since their appointment by an academic institution already qualified them. Later grant applications in 7-year intervals should be based on work already accomplished rather than on a fictive research plan. Her idea never materialized.

The story of K. leaves important questions unanswered. Who were his mentors? What recourse did he have? In the US, the members of the study section are known, disagreements may lead to site visits, the verdict can be appealed, if necessary by legal recourse. Unfortunately, the chairmen of the study sections are frequently scientists who dominate their fields and prevent better qualified competitors from being funded. Lawrence’s argument that original applications are eliminated because conventional applications are favored, is no longer valid because the applicants are aware of this and, as Lawrence points out, would only describe work already done and omit hot results for fear of theft by the referees.

A system which funds less than 20% of the applicants is already broken beyond rescue, no matter what remedies one proposes. The people who are in command do not need to look for grants, they have plenty of grant money, may not even have to write the cumbersome proposals themselves but delegate it to the best of their postdocs. They tour the meetings and present the work of their students and postdocs and in turn are credited in publications by their equally powerful friends in their papers that exclusively appear in first-rate journals. The system propagates itself.

The main problem is what Martin Luther King so appositely expressed in his Nobel Lecture of 1964: "Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers." He had a vision and accomplished more than any American of the last century but had to pay with his life for it, was assassinated by those in power.

Hans Noll, American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics and Molecular Biology, and Markus Noll, Institute for Molecular Biology, University of Zurich