Decompressing

I finished my first-ever grant proposal! I completed the 60 page application for a Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).  Should it get funded (after extensive review) I could earn up to $170,000 for the next 3 years (don't get too excited, my bank account would see a tiny fraction of the whole)!  I've helped write many proposals during my PhD/postdoc, but I've never started writing one from the ominous blank page, through the sleepless nights and hair-pulling, to finally hitting the wondrous submit button.  I enjoyed the end of the process, getting comments from reviewers and feeling like I obtained a much clearer vision of the work I am doing and want to do, but the initial stages were gruesome.  Still, I do wish I had done this a year ago when I first moved to Harvard, because it made me sit down and really study the big picture questions that I want to address as well as the nitty-gritty of day to day experiments. There is never enough time to read, especially when there are piles of experiments to do that are a lot more fun, so I actually left my lab bench for over a month (just worked in our office) so that I wouldn't be distracted. It worked, I hit the submit button 5 days before the actual deadline! 

Because it's your tax dollars that may fund my research, I thought I'd share the 2 sentence layperson description of my proposed research: "Cancer is a result of somatic cell mutation and evolution. Determining the dynamics of how growth-promoting mutations arise and accumulate in a population of cells is a fundamental problem underlying our understanding of tumorigenesis, early prognosis, and treatment of cancer."  Hmm, it makes sense to me, but maybe it's hard to summarize a 60 pg document in 2 sentences...Basically, I am using yeast cells to mimic cancer cells and determine how rapidly they mutate. This is a really basic question that we don't know the answer to: how frequently do your normal cells acquire mutations that make them cancerous? And once these cells have mutations, how long does it take them to form a tumor?  I'd be happy to expand, just post a comment if you want more details:)