The Best Place in the World to Do Research Posted on October 19, 2007 Husseini K. Manji (bio) talks about working at NIMH.

The NIMH is one of the institutes at the NIH. The NIH is the National Institutes of Health, and it has multiple institutes, say, for example, the Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Cancer Institute, Endocrine, and so on. What individuals sometimes don’t appreciate as much is that 90% of the NIH is actually dedicated to funding grants to universities. About 10% of it is in what’s referred to as the intramural campus that’s based in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s where a lot of research goes on in all these areas. It’s the biggest biomedical research facility in the world, with a huge number of Nobel laureates and probably the world’s experts in almost everything you can think of.

It’s got positives and negatives. The positives are that it has, as I mentioned, the world’s experts in almost everything, so whatever area you’re interested in, there’s someone there who has an expertise in it. The other big advantage is that the people who have permanent positions there are sort of hand-picked, and the notion is that these are individuals who the establishment thinks can make a contribution, and what they do is provide us with resources to do our experiments, to conduct science, etc., and we don’t have to apply for grants on a project-by-project basis, and that’s certainly one of the big pluses, is that if one has an idea, one often has the resources to go ahead and try it out without having to apply for the grants, etc.

There obviously has to be some sort of criteria to evaluate and judge us, and every four years we have something called a BSC, or a Board of Scientific Counselors review, and basically outside experts are brought in to evaluate our work, and, generally speaking, these are people considered the world’s experts in these different areas, and come and grill us and critique us in a pretty tough manner to really show that we’re doing appropriate work for the resources we’re receiving, etc. And so while those reviews are tough, I think they’re completely warranted. You know, if we’re not doing the job we’re supposed to be doing, we shouldn’t be there, so I think it’s appropriate to have a very rigorous review process. I think it’s the best place in the world to do research.

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