Other Sup­port

by Roberto

Bun­dle of US pen­sion doc­u­ments from 1906 bound in red tape. Source

Here's some­thing that I sus­pect many STC read­ers, par­tic­u­larly those ap­ply­ing for fund­ing, will sym­pa­thize with. For about forty years I wrote count­less fel­low­ship and grant ap­pli­ca­tions. All along I no­ticed a steady in­crease in the num­ber of bu­reau­cratic forms that needed to be filled out to ren­der an ap­pli­ca­tion com­plete. One of the great ben­e­fits of re­tire­ment is the com­plete dis­ap­pear­ance of such red tape ac­tiv­i­ties in my life. But then, a re­cent change in the grant ap­pli­ca­tion process at the NIH made me wish I could once again sub­mit pro­pos­als sim­ply to be able to com­ply with a par­tic­u­lar re­quire­ment. For as long as I can re­mem­ber, pro­pos­als needed to in­clude a sec­tion en­ti­tled "Other Sup­port" in or­der to de­ter­mine if there was any over­lap in sci­en­tific aims of pur­port­edly dif­fer­ent projects. In the ever-in­creas­ing ef­fort to mon­i­tor investigator's full dis­clo­sure of out­side ac­tiv­i­ties, the in­struc­tions of the Other Sup­port re­port­ing now state:

"Other Sup­port in­cludes all re­sources made avail­able to a re­searcher in sup­port of and/or re­lated to all of their re­search en­deav­ors, re­gard­less of whether or not they have mon­e­tary value and re­gard­less of whether they are based at the in­sti­tu­tion the re­searcher iden­ti­fies for the cur­rent grant."

The in­struc­tions also state this about in-kind con­tri­bu­tions:

"If the time com­mit­ment or dol­lar value of the in-kind con­tri­bu­tion is not read­ily as­cer­tain­able, the re­cip­i­ent must pro­vide rea­son­able es­ti­mates."

If I could do it all over again… here are just three es­sen­tial Other Sup­port in-kind re­sources that I would list and la­bel as per­ma­nently on call and price­less:

My fam­ily, my dogs and my ther­a­pist, all of whom tol­er­ate my ex­treme mood swings and help guard my san­ity dur­ing grant writ­ing time

Grant ap­pli­cants of the world: have fun list­ing all your oth­er­wise un­der­ap­pre­ci­ated Other Sup­port out there! I am sure the func­tionar­ies read­ing your ap­pli­ca­tions will de­light in your whimsy.