This news may get some people a tad riled up. Part of the continuing trend of big interdisciplinary science projects, the NIH announced today the nine interdisciplinary research consortia that will receive $210 million in grants over the next five years for work on a range of areas, from aging and fertility, to drug discovery and psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. Two of these teams are led by Boston-based folks: Richard Maas of Brigham and Women’s and Edward Scolnick of the Broad Institute.

The Maas group will take a systems and computational approach to regenerating the tooth germ, the pancreatic islet and heart valves using stem cells (federally approved ones, of course). Researchers from Children’s Hospital, Harvard, Harvard Medical School and MIT are involved. The Scolnick group is developing genomic technology for drug discovery.

With the shrinking NIH budget, fewer people are getting new or renewed R01 grants; young scientists are scrambling and labs are downsizing. But then there are these huge grants such as these ones, which range from $21 million to $25 million each, going to fewer numbers of people and PIs. I’m reminded of a commentary Robert Weinberg, the famed cancer researcher at the Whitehead, wrote in Cell about a year ago, arguing that the small, R01-type of grants are what will yield the next big discoveries and fuel the brightest minds and they should be paramount. He wrote that top young scientists won’t want to participate in these huge projects because they’ll just be “small cogs in very large wheels.” He told me he got a lot of supportive feedback from various scientists.

This article from the Globe about these new grants raises another good point: how will participation in these kinds of projects look on a CV when hiring/promotion decisions are made? Maas told the Globe that the institutions involved in his project pledge to look favorably on young scientists working on the project when tenure decisions come up, even though they’re not the PIs.

In other news, Massachusetts’s top court heard arguments yesterday in the case against the BU BSL-4 infectious disease lab (now under construction). Chief Justice Margaret Marshall said the case “sounded like a NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) case”:https://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/blog/2007/09/top_court_hears.html, which, not surprisingly, got the South End residents suing to stop the construction a little upset. Klare Allen, a South End activist, told the Globe she found the comment “very insulting.” The Supreme Judicial Court didn’t say when it will rule.