BOSTON — With so many topnotch research proposals seeking funding but only limited grant money to go around, deciding which among the best of the best projects to support is no easy task. What if you have a number of equally commendable applications and you don’t know how to break the tie? Usually, a panel of experts will weigh the merits of the various projects and come to some consensus behind closed doors. But in an unconventional twist, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) has opted to let the general public act as scientific judge and jury.
After six weeks of online voting and nearly 6,500 votes cast, the decision was in. Today, the Harvard-affiliated hospital announced that a project designed to explore how best to integrate genomic sequencing into routine medical care for healthy newborns had won the inaugural BRIght Futures Prize. The project’s leader, clinical geneticist Robert Green, and his team received a $100,000 research grant from the BWH’s Biomedical Research Institute (BRI).
“I’m not sure if there’s any other example where an academic institution has allowed the public to decide to whom they’ll give some of their hard-earned, hard-raised research money,” says Jacqueline Slavik, executive director of the BRI.
“Our goal was really to engage the Brigham community at large,” adds Lesley Solomon, director of strategy and innovation at the institute. “We want the world to know about the breadth and depth of the research that goes on here.”
It may sound akin to a popularity contest, but Slavik and Solomon are quick to point out that all three finalists for the prize had gone through a rigorous, behind-the-scenes, peer-reviewed vetting process before reaching the final stage. Review committees with expertise in personalized medicine and systems immunology—the two subject areas for which the BRI solicited proposals for the prize—winnowed the list of applicants down to a series of semifinalists. Each selected applicant made an in-person pitch to the BRI’s Research Oversight Committee, which ultimately chose the three proposals that were presented to the public. The three finalists then worked together with the hospital’s public affairs team to create a series of videos and brief nontechnical descriptions about the projects that were hosted on the voting site.
“It’s a new way of trying to decide who gets the money when you have equally meritorious projects,” says Slavik. “We could flip a coin,” she quips. Instead, by engaging the public, “we achieve several goals at once,” without sacrificing scientific rigor.