Priority

In his recent blog entry, my friend VW outlined his plan of conducting a randomized control trial back in the days when he was a house officer. He went on and discussed why some people continue to have excellent research idea but they hardly bear any fruit. (See http://vwswong.blogspot.hk/2012/09/change.html)

Simple, eh?

No. It involves much deeper a water and actually several unrelated problems that may skip your eyes.

To begin with, an excellent research idea to one (especially when it is viewed with some hindsight) may not be at all interesting to the funding bodies - or, in the jargon of our friends outside the solar system, not having sufficiently high priority.

The sobering truth is, how our funding bodies rank research priority is no different from how the lay public choose which stock to buy: When everyone sees a great opportunity in a particular item, it usually means that  this item has already passed its prime time.