top of page

Details and Transcript

Buzzsprout Affiliate Link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=891796​

​

Timestamps​

  • 00:00 - Introduction

  • 01:28 - Segment 1: The Odd Contest (Short Story)

  • 11:34 - Segment 2: The Origin of "With Flying Colours" (Metaphor History)

  • 21:31 - Segment 3: Grant Panels (Communication Topic)

  • 38:11 - Segment 4: Talk With Guillaume Thuéry (Guest Interview)

​

References

​

Theme Music​

​

Transcript

 

To my vivacious family and friends. Near and far. Old and new. This is Kevin Mercurio on the mic. And welcome to the 49th episode of the Metaphorigins Podcast.

 

To show support if you find yourself enjoying wordy scicomm content, please take a few seconds to rate and subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify or whatever platform you are listening to this on, as it truly does help independent podcasts reach new people, through essentially minimal effort. You can always leave a lengthy review as well, and follow @metaphorigins on Instagram, that’s @metaphorigins, where I will be posting all updates, as well as on my personal website: kjbmercurio.com/metaphorigins. There is now a Metaphorigins LinkedIn Page as well, so check it out and give it a follow if you like passionate scicomm initiatives. Like every season, I will hold a prize draw on my 50th episode for… quite honestly, the WORLD CUP of podcast prizes. Check out the social media pages for more information about this insanely invaluable reward, whatever it ends up being, before the Season 5 Finale!

 

Okay. For today’s episode, I’ll be talking about an expression used at the end of a successful undertaking, despite the task being so difficult to begin with.

 

Annnnnnd, embark. It is a loud and boisterous night. You are seated at a table with piles and piles of food and drink, more than you could consume in a year, more than the other 100 or so men could swallow tonight who are also in attendance. There, in the middle of each table, shredded cattle meat and roasted chicken legs, lamb chops that just melt off the bone, a seemingly endless stream of wine flowing from unlimited bottles, fresh vegetables of all leafy greens to purple eggplants, and the juiciest fruits in all of Greece. The men are obnoxiously drunk, slurring their words, laughing at their splendour and given hospitality, as they knew that Zeus’ Law demanded that they be treated as if they were gods themselves, hidden in disguise.

 

You know this isn’t the case, sure, that the gods would be hiding in ordinary cloaks and village armour, each dressed in their regional colours from across the land. Not in this palace at least, containing men from all regions of Ithaca. Some were residents of the urban city of Asty, others were rural farmers from the countryside, or hardened mountain folk from Mount Neriton, or fishermen from the coastal areas near the Spring of Arethusa. Even their weapons, swords, spears and arrows, were coloured representing their region. All have come to the palace as suitors in order to wed the lone Queen of Ithaca, Penelope. It is believed that her husband, the late Odysseus, had sacrificed himself during the Trojan War, after cleverly thinking of a plan to sneak into the walled city with his army. Penelope, refusing to believe he had passed, had locked herself in the palace all these years, ruling the island as best she could during his absence. Though, the true ruling party, the Elders, commanded that it be time that she find a new king.

 

A man suddenly stands and jumps up on one of the tables, kicking the munched on bones and half-empty wine glasses, some shattering upon impact with the floor. A collective cheer rang the room as the men raised their fists in the air. The man gestures to quiet down, as he has something extremely important to say.

 

“A man… BANG BANG. “A fleet...” BANG BANG. “A war…” BANG BANG. “A man…” BANG BANG. “A thought…” BANG BANG. “A trick…” BANG BANG. “A trick to break the walls of Troy…” BANG BANG. “And burn it screaming to the ground!” Each pound of the wooden staff into the ground added likely for dramatic effect.

 

You look at the suitors, sharing the same level of confused glances. This is already known information, that Odysseus and his men created a hollow wooden horse that they would offer to Troy as a gift of peace. Only they would be hiding inside, waiting for the right time to strike inside the walls of Troy. Was he drunk to the point of revealing past prophecy?

 

A man at the back of the room, a suitor named Antinous, shouts, “Oh shut up Phemius, you ghastly bastard, and stick to your singing will ya?”

 

The suitors all laugh again and several hurl food and wine at Phemius, who hurries off the table and scuttles to the nearest corner in fear. At this moment, the doors at the front of the room slide open, and out walks the Queen of Ithaca. She is wearing a beautiful woven cloth of dark turquoise and patterned flora. In her hands, is the infamous palintonos hunting bow that Odysseus was known to use, and the only one who was capable of stringing it.

 

Penelope raises the bow above her head. “The Elders have spoken, and the time has come. The time for which I will pick one of you to hold my hand at the throne. My next husband, the next King of Ithaca.”

 

The suitors, already standing at the site and grace of Penelope, clap their hands in applause. Years of coming to the palace have paid off, and one of them will be lucky enough to be the next king. Perhaps they will be able to bear a son of their own one day, starting a new royal bloodline etched in the island’s legacy.

 

Penelope continues, “I will choose the winner of my contest.” She states, still holding the bow above her head. “Which one of you can string this bow and shoot an arrow through the handles of 12 axe heads, like my dear Odysseus could so easily do?” Servants, who were standing at the edges of the room, begin setting up the axes.

 

Antinous, steps forward to the front of the crowd. “My fair lady, you know as well as I that Odysseus was the only one who could do this task. I have not seen another soul come close to stringing that bow.”

 

One of the suitors, a fisherman dressed in his blue village clothing and carrying his blue arrows, chuckles and walks to Penelope, grabbing the bow from her hands. He inspects it from head to toe, even smelling the polished wood as if this characteristic could support in the daunting challenge at hand. He grabs the loose string, places one end of the bow under one arm, and with all his might tries to bend the bow to no avail. Not even a small curve could be observed, and the other men laugh at his attempt.

 

Another suitor, a large miner from Mt. Neriton, wearing a long red cloak and carrying small red blades and arrows, takes the bow from the fisherman and shakes it. He smacks the ends off the bow, potentially hoping to loosen the wood fibres with his brute strength. He kneels down, grabs the loose string, places the bow over his bent knee and tries to bend the bow with all his might, but to no avail. There was a slight curvature observed, and so the men pat him on the back for a decent attempt.

 

Antinous grabs the bow and turns to Penelope. “My lady, as I said earlier, this contest is impossible.”

 

“I would like to try,” You say.

 

Penelope and the suitors look to you for the first time, still seated at one end of the largest table. In battered clothes, you rise up, gently walking towards Antinous holding the bow. You reach out your hand in request for the contest prop.

 

Antinous grins and shouts, “Somebody get these BEGGARS out of here!”

 

Penelope intervenes, “No, this is my contest. He may have his chance just like every one else.”

 

You grab the bow from Antinous and also inspect it. Of course, it’s a bow you’ve seen many times, a bow you’ve used to hunt on the island of Ithaca to support Penelope and your son Telemachus. You even used it to teach children across Ithaca in the skill of archery, plucking the string to initiate the hunt and successfully catching the animal, giving it the proper respect it deserved. In your hands, the bow feels comfortable, ready to be used once again by its owner.

 

You sit down next to the table and place the bow underneath one of your thighs, and hook the bottom end close to the opposite ankle. You take the loose string, and after a deep breath, begin to bend the top end toward your body. Slowly the bow curves in a way none of the suitors ever thought possible, and you are able to string the bow.

 

Antinous, still shocked at what he was seeing, says, “This… This is not possible. Unless…”

 

With one hand holding the strung bow, you use your other hand to reach into your satchel inside your ragged cloak to pull out a multi-coloured arrow. It was coloured for each region of Ithaca, from the calming blue shades of the coast, to the blazing red forgeries of the mountains, to the green pastures of the countryside, and the lovely magenta of the urbanized capital. You walk towards one end of the line of axes and look through the handles, seeing the target board in the back, a board you’ve hit numerous times to the joy of your wife Penelope. With the vibrant bow, you line up your shot, pull the arrow back, and release.

 

With flying colours, the arrow traverses through the handles and pierces the target board with ease. The suitors stare dumbfounded, while slowly retreating away from you like scared animals in the face of an apex predator. Removing your hood, you nod to Penelope, as she smiles, tears flowing from her eyes.

 

“You’ve come home,” she states.

 

Antinous, still holding his hand to his mouth in surprise says, “No… No… This can’t be. Odysseus is dead, you shouldn’t be here! Get him!” A battle commences, but somehow, despite being outnumbers by over 100 to 1, and armed with a bow, you manage to take out each suitor with your multi-coloured arrows through a gift from the gods known as “plot armour”.

 

It’s funny how this whole thing was to get to a point where I could say Robert Pattinson’s now meme-ified line in the Odyssey. Also, first time doing a woman’s voice for a short story, could you even tell it was me, like C’mon, and the Oscar goes to… Anyway, you likely caught today’s idiom, something I myself use often but rarely thought about regarding the soaring heights of colours for triumph.

 

What’s the origin to the expression, “With Flying Colours?”

 

*Theme Music*

 

 

Most of this information was obtained from many articles discussing the uses and origin of this expression. All sources will be mentioned in the description.

 

Over the last few months since my PhD came to an end, I had time, and I mean a lot of time, to reflect on my actions which brought me to where I am today. It’s certainly an important exercise, so do try it out yourself if you become unemployed like me for about half a year, but if there’s one piece of advice I could give in this economy, it is to keep your jobs. Anyway, certain actions, either consciously or unconsciously, have shaped the trajectory of my life in ways I never would have guessed, ways that, for better or worse, developed character and potential to look at whatever circumstances I was facing and say, “Damn, I guess I should probably do something about that.”

 

In my early years, I was a shy kid, hiding behind the leg of my mother or father whenever someone approached me to tell me how much I’ve grown, or ask me what my favourite animal was, or try and pick me up because I looked like just the cutest thing. In the classroom, my teachers would continuously encourage me to participate in group discussion more and more, even bringing it up to my parents at parent-teacher meetings that I rarely said a word in class. They knew I was bright, and hell, even I knew I was somewhat smart enough to understand whatever they were lecturing us about, whether that be complicated science or mathematics or English literature for adolescents. But when I got to my final year of elementary school, there was this competition where students could compete in public speaking, giving a talk to the entire school about a topic of their choice, rated by our principal and several teachers. My older brother actually competed in this same competition when he was in his final year of elementary school, and almost won his contest talking about learning Karate. I decided that I could really challenge myself here, get over this fear of speaking in front of large audiences, and decided to compete. I spent weeks memorizing my script, talking about my first ski trip and the many mistakes I made learning how to turn, slow down, and move along flat areas of the slope, falling down more times than anyone should, and even dancing in some ridiculous way upon making it down the mountain for the very first time. And surprisingly, I won (sucks to suck Patrick!).

 

In high school, I faced different issues that still sort of plague me to this day, despite it being out of my control. I talked about this in previous episodes this season, but in the dangerous jungle of the high school environment, I really didn’t have many friends, or at least I had no friends that were close enough to me to build that trusting relationship one should have with friends, at least not until later on. But again, in my final year of this educational stepping stone, I felt the need to prove myself in some way, that I had the potential to leave a mark on an institute that had been crushing my spirits since day one, to be someone I was proud of and provide evidence to myself of the mantra adults tell children every day, that you can do anything you set your mind to man, like Eminem’s finishing line in the classic rap hit, Lose Yourself. Yet again, an opportunity presented itself, where students get elected by the student body to be Co-Presidents of their final year, spearheading the organization of events surrounding holidays, fundraisers and school spirit engagements. Coincidentally, my brother also ran a campaign in his final year at the same high school, and almost won. So, with my friend Alex, we ran a campaign announcing new events that hadn’t been planned in many years, like talent shows, water fights, and ice cream days. But it was really the speech that I think made the biggest difference, when I thought that it would be a great idea to be more animated on stage when delivering our final address to the student body, as opposed to being static at the stage podium like the other candidates, in order to really differentiate ourselves. And surprisingly, Alex and I won (haha, sucks to suck Patrick!).

 

That connection of public speaking insight from my elementary school days perhaps, in some way or another, came to the forefront during Alex and my brainstorming sessions about what we could do to be more engaging with our voters, SIX years later. When I realized that, I was like, holy shit, what else had prepared me for things down the line, laying a foundation to build on new skills or enhance skills I was lucky enough to already possess, particularly in the realm of communications skills, especially since I have ended up in a communications role in industry, while producing a communications podcast as a hobby, while advocating for communications training at all levels of career development. There was that time I volunteered at my hometown’s Animal Rescue centre walking dogs because I needed to get more daily exercise, or sign up to be a mentor at Big Brothers Big Sisters because I wanted to understand how schools in poor communities had changed since my upbringing, or learn how to boost my confidence in strangers because I was so lonely after the breakup of my first and only relationship at the time (note, this was pre-manosphere culture, okay). All of these experiences were initiated because I had noticed I was unhappy about something in my life, and wanted to change that about myself, despite the prolonged process it would take to solve that discrepancy.

 

Like Xuanzang in the 16th century epic, the Journey to the West, it was really the adventure of accomplishing these tasks that led to enlightenment, or in my case, developing a skill that brought me closer and closer to who I am today. Without that hardship, I don’t believe I’d have come out of it all as the same person, at the very least not necessarily losing the skills I obtained, but reminiscing on the process of development as a critical time for accumulating resilience. It is that attribute that I think gets leveled up time and time again during those early years which stands around in your mind during any task, large or small, forcing you to remember not to quit. It’s such an important personality trait that, that even the most monumental of tasks done years earlier now seem like a cakewalk, or to allude to Season 1 Episode 4 of this podcast, a piece of cake.

 

And that brings us to today’s idiom. Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes the phrase, with flying colours, to mean, “with complete or eminent success”. Used with the common verb, to pass with flying colours, Grammarist states, “means to be extremely successful, to achieve something that is difficult, to excel”. I had always mistaken this expression to mean that things done with flying colours meant that you had achieved something with relative ease, rather than push through difficulty to succeed. It’s such a vibrant use of language that I was excited to hear about its origins.

 

Where exactly did the phrase originate from? The Australian Writers Centre, PhraseFinder and Grunge.com all attribute the expression to nautical origins. Back in the 1600s, the term colour was used as another word for flag, and so ships often sailed with their colours raised on their ship’s mast. Now, these ships could be used for any number of things like merchant dealings and exploration, but at that time many ships were used in military operations. As mentioned in Grunge, “during naval warfare, if a ship returned home or "passed" the harbor with "flying colors" or their flags unfurled, it would communicate to the countrymen they had been triumphant.” They also mention, “the phrase "with flying colors" first appeared in William Ames' "A Reply to Dr. Mortons Generall Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies" in 1622” although this does not align with the Online Etymology Dictionary’s first recorded use of the phrase in the 1690s. Such figurative usage of the phrase likely means that with flying colours was regularly used well before this time. Interestingly, mental floss also mentions more phrases regarding naval colours that we still use today, “Lowering your flags in an act of surrender? That’s striking the colors. Want the enemy to know that you don’t plan on surrendering, even though your ship is now so damaged that the flags are starting to fall of their own accord? Go ahead and nail your colors to the mast. Cruising around under stolen flags so other ships don’t realize you’re actually a band of pirates? You’re sailing under false colors.”

 

To me, it’s interesting that colour was used to describe the flag, a symbolic representation of loyalty. Flags today come in all colours and patterns, some like Canada’s flag alluding to the rich natural landscape of Canadian wildlife, while some like the Philippines’ flag symbolizing unity and the history of revolution. It further expands on my understanding about the importance of tradition and past events, relating to the excitement felt of fictional vexillophile Dr. Sheldon Cooper in his podcast, Fun With Flags. Colour me surprised but I was tickled pink about how we forget about how the past shaped who we are in the present, and continuously shape us into our newer selves of the future. As mentioned, it’s the actions we take today that can make a dramatic impact on our trajectory in our personal and professional lives. It’s why I decided to run my first and only marathon in 2024, to prove to myself that I was capable of such an excruciating physical task, completing it at a surprising time of 4 hours and 25 minutes. My brother actually competed in his first marathon several years before that, and completed it at a time of 4 hours and  21 minutes, (haha, sucks to suck Pat… oh wait, he beat me, dammit!).

 

 

*Theme Music*

​

​

For the communications segment, I want to follow the money, like Robert Redford’s character in the movie All the President’s Men when investigating the Watergate Scandal in the US. Except this money is utilized by scientists all across the world to conduct ambitious yet outstanding research to solve the problems we face as a society. And that topic is grant panels.

 

Now, I just want to preface this segment by saying the amount of instructional bureaucracy in understanding the grant review panel process was incredibly difficult to navigate. Not only is there a variety of different methods in which agencies conduct their grant panels, but the level of complexity that goes into application policy was so insurmountable at times that I could not possibly write an engaging podcast script that I would be proud of. I mean, you may even be asking yourself, why torture yourself by learning the ins and outs of this specific form of institutionalized peer review? And to those questioners, I say to you, why not challenge the ol’ noggin’ and bring forth an interesting angle to something academics dread doing every single year (sometimes multiple times each year). And also, what truly is this award principle investigators (or PIs) received that dictates whether you will be funded completely or partially for the majority of your research project?

 

To make it appealing from the very start, I’m going to commit one of the major crimes of storytelling, tell you the interesting bits rights away. Think of it like the rising action occurrences that are really beneficial to keep the momentum flowing but typically require some context to setup. Well, screw that context. Here’s what I found that was super cool about grant review panels: 1) The best grant reviewer is rarely the biggest expert in grant field; 2) The best grants can still not be funded; and 3) Reviewers don’t decide which grants get funded. Ultimately, despite experts being a major element along the proposal review process, the variable nature of their backgrounds make the selection process for reviewer panels incredibly difficult to create. To quote creator of the Subthesis platform Angel Reyes, the reality is that grants are reviewed by, “busy experts with varied expertise and limited time”. Of course, this is any sort of peer review process, but when thousands or millions of dollars of taxpayer money is on the line, suddenly this becomes a “Huh, that’s interesting” sort of revelation.

 

Peer review is a concept I’ve covered already on this podcast, so do check out old school Metaphorigins in Season 2 Episode 5 of this podcast, where I take a deep dive into journal peer review and interview my great scicomm friend Miranda Stahn. As I mentioned in that episode 6 years ago (holy crap time flies), in a blog post in CellPress, Vice President of Editorial Dr. Deborah Sweet mentions that “Younger scientists in particular often talk about the peer review process as being a mysterious -black box- that they simply don’t understand”. But what they do understand is the fundamental need for it, for merit assessment, for fairness and diverse opinion, for accountability through documentation processes and for advancing the field by promoting high quality research. There are issues with that process, no doubt, and discussed at length in that episode, but the sentiment remains that this process and all its flaws is our guiding light to push scientific frontiers further than they’ve ever been pushed before.

 

I remember when I was in my Masters, I participated in a grant writing workshop where students were instructed to create a grant based on their Masters projects. The professor conducting the workshop, luckily my Masters supervisor, provided a grant that she wrote to the class in order to have a template of a winning grant proposal for how to put together such a massive document. A grant, for those interested, can be thought  about as a general research paper, except the language and flow of a grant tends to focus on understanding theory, providing novel insight, timelines of proposed methodology, and preliminary data to back of your strategy. Now, you don’t want it to be too focused on theory, as it’s not a systematic review of the field, and you don’t want to provide too much novelty in that it sounds like what you hypothesize is more of a moonshot (another metaphor one language nerd should investigate), and you don’t want to have unrealistic timelines to complete your proposed experiments, and your don’t want to show too much data which suggests that you have completed the majority of the work already! So easy! Now get it at!

 

In reality, this actually does happen to some extent. When preparing to apply for a grant, researchers have tools, like the Matchmaker tool and RePORTER database for the National Institutes of Health (or NIH), to see summaries and details of successfully funded grants. Not only that, you can also see which institutes funded similar work to yours, making selection of which grants to apply to that much more specific and data-driven. Like why apply to grants allocated to certain institutes that don’t normally fund the type of research your wish to conduct? By focusing your time and attention on grant calls that have a precedent for giving researchers like you money, this substantially increases the competitiveness of your application.

 

Now, that’s a bit of a naive overview of grant competitiveness, as there’s a lot more that goes into deciding whether a grant application goes to review. Like a journal, which would have levels of editors to decide whether a manuscript is fit for the journal’s topic scope, a grant agency would have levels of officers. For example, at the NIH, these officers are called Program Officials (PO), Scientific Review Officers (SRO), and Grants Management Officers or Specialists (GMO/GMS). Program Officials manage the institute’s portfolio of awards, provides program advice, recommends applications to be considered for awards, and does most of the post-award oversight liaison with the PIs. Scientific Review Officers are responsible for the actual scientific or technical review process, ensure fair and unbiased evaluation, summarizes the panels’ assessment, and serve as points of contact during the review process with the PIs. And finally, Grants Management Officers act to complete the business management requirements, evaluate compliance of applications with program policies, negotiates on behalf of institute for the awards, and will be the point of contact related to the terms and conditions of the award with PIs. That’s at least three individuals applicants need to keep track of during the entire lifespan of the grant process, from applying for the grant to the grant’s expiration date many years later. The competitiveness of your grant application needs to survive all of these bureaucratic checkpoints.

 

Of course, that’s still too much a simplistic view of what makes grant applications competitive. This characteristic is of course dictated by the nature of the reviewers selected. It is the Scientific Review Officer that manages the review process, recruits reviewers, conducts panel meetings and summarizes official statements and panel outcomes. Here, there are some limitations that make this process arguably ineffective in favour of efficiency. One of these limitations is Time Constraints. Reviewers, many of which are professors in esteemed institutes themselves, with the vast majority doing this completely for free and in the name of academic tradition, are not given a lot of time to review proposals. For example, reviewers for grant panels of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (or CIHR), one of the Tri-Council funding agencies in Canada, are given 4-5 weeks for the peer review process, some of which receive 8-10 applications to review. And remember, these are large documents, around 10 pages of dense scientific content. Another limitation is Expertise Limits. Imagine if the grant application is incredibly interdisciplinary, connected to aspects of microbiology, immunology, RNA biology, inflammatory disease, and regenerative medicine (golly, that sounds like my PhD project…), who are the experts to target for grant review, and are they even willing participants in the agency’s grant review process? These reviewers, none of which possess the ideal expert background to cover the bases of the grant proposal, will have subjective judgments on interpreting the data that need to be considered in length. And let’s not forget conservatism bias, a limitation that stems from the counter-intuitive argument to be skeptical of too much novelty in a grant’s hypotheses. Thus, even if the grant contains an amazing new theory of life and the universe, this level of novelty may actually hurt the application in some way, as Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” He is, of course, not wrong, but the inertia of going against the grain in science is heavy, and that weight can be a product of tradition and culture as opposed to lacking of evidence.

 

In a realistic scenario, the best reviewer is not the biggest expert in the field or fields of which the proposal crosses, but the one that is not too busy with academic responsibilities, ticks as many boxes as one can for background knowledge, and doesn’t have any conflicts of interest with the applicant, such as professional collaborations or personal relationships. Think of it, in very niche fields, how difficult this must be to find 2-3 reviewers who can participate in spearheading the grant’s evaluation! 

 

Once selected, and before the actual panel meeting, reviewers will need to perform individual review, make a detailed written critique, assign a preliminary score, and do as much preparatory reading into the subject matter due to being the main speakers of the grant proposal at the panel meeting. At this point, right before the very important meeting, there is a stage called the Triage or Streamlining phase for handling lower-scored proposals. Grant proposals below a certain score threshold at the preliminary stage are not discussed, allowing more efficiency and time to discuss more competitive proposals.

 

And then, finally, we get to the grant panel meeting, where expert reviewers come together to discuss proposals. They must first decide on a discussion order based on different attributes like time of submission or, more likely, preliminary score ranking, and then decide on time limits for discussing applications, ensuring all applications being discussed get a fair amount of allotted time. The discussion is typically initiated by the main reviewers of the grant being called to discussion, and it is here that the main reviewers provide their detailed opinion on the grant. Often, there is an aspect of the grant that has notable disagreement, and it is here that they can deliberate on why this disagreement exists. Other panel members may voice their opinions here, despite not reading the grant application in depth. It’s an important step, and I am actually quite impressed with the outline of the discussion, providing an opportunity for diverse opinion and nitpicking at the essence of the grant itself. In the end, the score gets reevaluated based on the new points made, and finalized. Here, again, the Scientific Review Officer plays an essential role with the expert panel in collecting all scores to create an overall score, rank proposals, set a score threshold to decide which proposals get funded, and sometimes plan for secondary review with another expert panel.

 

At this point, what’s fascinating is that the grants with the highest scores and pass the score threshold don’t necessarily get selected as the award winners. Scores do not translate to funding, at least not in all cases. Indeed, after all that deliberation, reviewers are only assessing scientific merit, but agencies ultimately have to build a funding portfolio, and the agency’s director is the one who gets the final word. Agency staff will then meet to finalize the decision by asking questions like: Does this proposal fit the strategic objectives? What does the overall portfolio look like? How much money is actually available? Are partner funds involved? Are there specific program priorities? Does funding this proposal create a balanced portfolio? These are crucial factors that are taken into account to ensure that the agency has funded research that, all together encompass the overall goals that the agency set out to do. Oh, there are 10 amazing antibiotic research proposals? As it’s a minor priority for the agency, that means we’ll fund 1 or 2 of those projects, and you can bet it will likely be ones that can produce the most output in the end, or have some potential bias towards research that has been done by the agency in the past. 

 

That, to me, is a clear hindrance for innovation and a clear obstacle for out-of-the-box, creative thinking. But sadly, it make sense. Academic research is the most risk-averse investment in the game, partly because of the public facing nature of it, public funds being used to fuel universities and colleges, and the agencies which provide more money to universities and colleges. If anything, this more distinctly differentiates research conducted within the private sector, where efforts are streamlined to a more directed goal, one that is even more ruthless in what kind of novel research it funds, and how it will profit shareholders, based on revenue and abstract valuations. And so, when grant season comes along, whether you are a distinguished PI, an early career researcher, or a beginner graduate student, note that somewhere, there is a battle between originality and tradition, while bureaucracy is laughing on the sidelines with some popcorn.

 

*Theme Music*

​

​

For my 9th guest of the season, I’ll be interviewing someone with an incredible scientific career, using his expertise to navigate the complex bureaucracy and support all participants in government grant calls.

 

He has a background in neuroscience, neuropharmacology and neurogenetics, the latter in which he holds his PhD in. His research experience includes preclinical and translational research, with a particular interest in mental health and psychedelics. He currently works in the Research Strategy and Funding Directorate at the Health Research Board in Ireland, where he helps in the development and delivery of a range of research funding calls.

 

Please welcome the organizational whiz, Guillaume Thuéry.

 

*Theme Music*

 

 

*INTERVIEW*

 

 

I thoroughly enjoy chatting with friends who have moved onto new careers outside of the lab. I have nothing against laboratory work, honestly, it’s just that for most of my scientific career, that seemed to be the only thing I saw myself doing, joining the thousands or probably millions of scientists in the world in proposing innovative research to solve the problems of today, despite many other known career paths that have the exact same end goal. With that, I hope you enjoyed learning about “With Flying Colours” and Grant Panels. It’s always an enlightening exercise to peak behind the curtain of academic processes and work through the ins and outs of it with someone who’s actually there. Now being outside of academia, I have a more empathetic sense of what professors go through every year, and even the mountainous task of organizing panels of reviewers to provide scientists the money to fund their research. Anyway, regarding updates, it’s almost Halloween, and two months into a job I absolutely love. Really learning a lot about the business side of science, how to scale educational resource to support internal teams and users of an online platform, and realizing the value I can provide through a passion for science communication. Understanding what you’re good at and aligning that with your personal goals is something I am grateful for every day. But that’s it for this episode, thank you so much for listening. Do remember to follow the podcast Instagram page for all updates in cool visual format, along with the new LinkedIn page, and as always, anyone following will be placed into the draw to win some Metaphorigins swag, whatever that ends up being, on my 50th and Season 5 Finale! Oh gosh, that’s the next one! Okay, since it will be a behemoth of an episode, I will take a small break before its release sometime this December. Nonetheless, rate, subscribe, share, message, megaphone this episode to your family and friends. Tune in for the next episode, but until then, stay skeptical but curious.

 

 

*Theme Music*

​

​

bottom of page