The three selected are excellent choices. If you think otherwise, please provide evidence of their lack of merit.
How can you be an objective judge when you haven't seen any of the proposals or reviews? You seem highly biased in favor of OMF, to the point that you ardently believe they were the most deserving without even knowing who some of the alternatives are.
It seems more likely that all of the centers were excellent options. Instead of some losing out due to being flawed, they were probably excluded because another option was a bit better. Or because they simply had a better application. Not everyone could win ... at least, not yet.
It's disturbing to see the winning ME researchers being attacked as somehow being not good enough, just because some people wanted to see someone else get funded.
See Janet Dafoe's report below on what they wrote to Ron in his review, you may think differently at least in regards to that part. I agree with the fact that all of the winners have definite merit.
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Ron says: Our grant had a number of senior scientists at Stanford, including myself, Mark Davis a world renowned immunologist, Mike Snyder, Chair of Stanford Genetics dept, ranked the best genetics department in the world, and expert in big "omics" data, Craig Heller, a world expert in exercise physiology and fatigue, William Robinson MD, expert in autoimmune and Lyme's disease, Lars Steinmetz, an expert in complex genetics and mitochondria, as well as scientists from other universities, including, Robert Naviaux, USCD, world renowned expert in metabolomics and mitochondria physiology, Curt Scharfe, Yale Univ, expert in mitochondrial genetics, Wenzhong Xiao, Harvard, expert in bioinformatics and big data analysis, Robert Phair, CEO of Integrated Biioinformatics, Inc, which models complex biochemical pathways, Lucinda Bateman, of the Bateman-Horne Center, one of the foremost ME/CFS experts in the country, and Susan Levine, another well-known ME/CFS physician.
One of the major complaints was that I had no publications on ME/CFS. One of the criteria of this RFA was to bring new people into the field, which is impossible if reviewers exclude investigators without prior publications. The team I put together would be phenomenal for this field. All of us have experience and a myriad of publications that are directly relevant to the study of ME/CFS.
The review complained that our institutional environment was "mediocre". The Stanford office that reviews all Stanford grants told me that they had never seen a Stanford rating anywhere close to that low in their entire history. It's absurd to think that Stanford is not an excellent institutional environment.
They argued that my involvement with OMF constituted a conflict of interest. In fact, our interests are aligned, not in conflict! This is mystifying given the fact that the RFA required applicants to work with an NGO.
They didn't like our nano needle instrument. They said it's probably only measuring cytokines, but there's no data for that. They said it wasn't certified as government-approved for medical use with patients. This was mystifying because one of the aims of the grant was to develop the nano needle for medical use!
They complained that Janet was part of the community outreach part of the grant because she is my wife.
They said I had a conflict of interest because my son has ME/CFS.
They didn't like it that I had put out videos with preliminary results and ideas to the patients on PR and elsewhere because it was unpublished and not peer-reviewed.
There were a number of other criticisms that were mostly about scientific issues, that were mostly wrong. For example, we were proposing to use IPS cells, which they said wasn't validated, but in fact, it's used extensively and it's being used in the NIH Intramural study!
This is not a complete list, but I think you can get the picture from these examples.
We of course will continue to write grants until NIH funds us (we are submitting an R01 grant on Oct 5), and we will continue to actively work with OMF to raise private donations, but this is definitely a big setback. I was especially sad on Monday when Whitney was communicating with us on ativan and he cried in pure anguish, knowing that we can't help him as fast as I'd like to.
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