EARLY DISAPPOINTMENTS

We had lost a lot of time getting started. I was already 49 years old before I had ever been to Antarctica. Two years that I could ill afford had been wasted in fruitless attempts to convince skeptical reviewers that meteorites occur in concentrations on antarctic ice. This is not a condemnation of the system: I can always be convicted of writing unconvincing proposals.

The system we have in the United States (US) for deciding whether or not to grant funds for new research is probably the best that can be designed. Major granting agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and, specific to this case, the National Science Foundation (NSF) invite research ideas from the general community of scientists. These ideas are written in the form of research proposals, which are then sent to three or more reviewers in the same field as that of the proposer. In a majority of cases, the reviewers actually know the proposer and, in order to preserve friendships if possible, they are protected by a cloak of anonymity. This is a wise provision, but very frustrating to the proposer who receives bad reviews and wants to seek out these less insightful colleagues and give them a good shake!

In the case of my proposal to search for meteorites in Antarctica, the reviewers apparently could not accept as significant the early evidence of the Japanese experience that to me seemed so clear.