It has been said that death and taxes are inevitable and dreaded evils. As scientists we can add a third, the writing of a grant proposal. Why is the business of writing a grant proposal so disliked? There are a number of reasons: the principal investigator, as he is called to lower his self-esteem, must compress his ideas into a mold which has been ordained by the granting agencies; he must express his ideas in an idiom with which he may not be familiar; he must be mindful that he must please the reviewers, whose scientific interest and experience may be that of a competitor; he must realize that the reviewers, in order to appear intelligent, must find fault with his application; finally to be successful, the proposal should deal with a subject of current interest, not necessarily his own. A scientist who can wrap his ideas into the mantle of sophistication, without interfering or competing with the reviewers’ territory, is endowed with the specific gene of grantsmanship. The location of this gene is not known and it has as yet not been cloned. This gene can be absent in great scientists and the defect is compatible with scientific excellence...