How to Write a Really Bad Grant Application (and Other Helpful Advice for Scientists)

Many people think that they do not need a book on "how to write a really bad grant application" - they already know how. Actually, this book is intended as a guide to writing grant applications that will get funded. One way to write a good grant application is to avoid writing a bad one. This book analyzes "bad" scientific grant applications from a humorous perspective. There are also some sections on obtaining funding from private foundations and industry, and a few parts that are pure silliness. All pieces in this book are original and are either fiction (the humor pieces) or non-fiction (the serious advice). The reader will hopefully be able to tell the two apart.

Lloyd Fricker has written several bad grant applications, and thus is an expert on the subject. He has also written a number of applications that received "outstanding" scores and were funded by the National Institutes of Health, private foundations, and companies. He served for many years as a reviewer for NIH and other public and private funding agencies. In addition to his serious scientific publications, Lloyd Fricker has published several dozen humor articles in a variety of journals (Annals of Improbable Research, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and many others); some of these articles have been widely circulated on the internet. When not writing humor, the author is a Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.