In Friday’s Science, the head of the NIH, Elias Zerhouni wrote an article about the funding situation in the “post-doubling” era….the “perfect storm” that we’re now in, where the NIH budget doubling of the 1990s has led to many more scientists looking for money from a now shrinking pot. He expressed concern for young scientists trying to get their new labs funded.

It’s touched off an interesting little exchange on Effect Measure, a blog by NIH-funded public health scientists, who give us their take on Zerhouni’s article. There is a string of comments, including a slightly contrarian one from Cervantes posted earlier this morning saying that high grant rejection rates or asking for them to be resubmitted is not a bad thing and isn’t necessarily a sign of tough funding times. Cervantes reminds us that “the appropriate measure of how much and where to spend research dollars is the public interest, not the desperation of post-docs for their own R01 and tenure.”

So given that the NIH budget is already huge ($28 billion), and even with that much money, so many people are getting their grant proposals rejected, does that mean that there are simply too many life scientists?