Trial By Error: MEGA’s Latest Failure
18 SEPTEMBER 2017
By David Tuller, DrPH
In
his welcome talk at last week’s annual conference of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative (CMRC), the chair, Professor Stephen Holgate, praised his colleague and second-in-command, Professor Esther Crawley, for her “stunning” and “amazing” work on the group’s main research initiative. There was just one problem: That initiative, the
ME/CFS Epidemiology and Genomics Alliance (MEGA), had recently failed in its second high-profile bid for major funding.
Earlier this year, of course, MEGA announced that it had failed in its first big effort, a submission to the Wellcome Trust. This second unsuccessful bid was to the Medical Research Council (MRC). Professor Holgate tried to put a positive gloss on things by vowing that MEGA would learn from this defeat and press forward. Yet he undoubtedly knows that applicants who repeatedly get turned down for top grants can start to smell like losers. Funders prefer to shower money on those perceived as winners. Notwithstanding Professor Crawley’s stunning and amazing work, MEGA so far has proven itself more loser than winner.
Before sharing the unfortunate news about MEGA’s bid, Professor Holgate appeared to be trying to soften the blow and rationalize the rejection by praising proposals in this emerging research field that get “to the edge of being funded,” even if they ultimately fail.
“As we start to ramp up the quality of research, you won’t just see a switch and suddenly money pouring in,” Professor Holgate explained to those assembled for the two-day conference. “You see people almost getting there but not quite, reconfiguring their applications and then coming back in again and getting it right. So this is the right direction of travel and I think it’s absolutely wonderful that we’re seeing this happening now.”
As I interpret his remarks, Professor Holgate’s optimistic view is that MEGA, after two failed bids, is now traveling in the “right direction” on its “wonderful” journey. As he explained, the MEGA proposal survived the first round at the MRC and made it to the interview stage, along with several other candidates. Then the bid lost momentum, for reasons he did not share.
“We got down to the short list, which was great,” said Professor Holgate. “We were interviewed but at the interview we didn’t quite make the cut. That doesn’t mean this whole thing is just going to wither on the vine, it means we need to take the feedback from the Medical Research Council committee, sit down, get serious about what they said, and think about where we’re going next with this. But I can tell you this is not the end by any means, we are definitely going to move forward. We just have to make sure that when we do move forward we learn from the experience and then we look for opportunities for funding elsewhere.”
