Posted: March 8th, 2016

Writing a Chemical Biology Proposal

Writing a Chemical Biology Proposal
First, generate an idea. For this course, you don’t have to come up with the next Manhattan Project.
Instead, you want a simple, creative idea. A single experiment amenable to a very limited budget is ideal.
Since you don’t have a lab (yet!) and you’re an unknown quantity to people reviewing your ideas, you’re
dependent upon your creativity and insight to get you a chance to run your experiment. Furthermore, though
anyone can think of the “give me $10 million bucks to purchase this equipment to measure X” experiment, a
young scientist like yourself won’t get that opportunity. You can assume that someone else better established
will get the $10 million, and checks that large don’t grow on trees. So, with a small lab (2-3 people), limited
funding, and a few students, what would you do to expand our knowledge of the universe?
Actually, you can do quite a lot. Clever ideas abound in a field aimed at advancing a molecular
understanding of biology using new techniques from chemistry or solving chemical problems using biology.
Some ground rules: You want to choose a topic that will improve human health and well being broadly. The
focus must squarely qualify as chemical biology. Your proposal should have a hypothesis or a very good
reason not to be driven by testing a specific hypothesis. After that, start brainstorming. You want a single
experiment, but you also want to hit your audience with your backup plans, creative variations, and further
insight. Do not propose experiments requiring human subjects or samples obtained from human subjects. In
addition, do not propose ideas similar to your laboratory’s research agenda; I will recognize these from long
experience serving on various UCI review panels. Do not propose experiments involving green tea, marijuana
or any other natural substances without prior approval from Prof. Weiss. Your proposal must include welldesigned
control experiments, preferably negative controls for each variable and a positive control, when
available.
So, how do you come up with the idea? You can pick the area first. Or start with the problem and
propose solutions. Good ideas often connect two disparate fields, bringing new tools to bear on a challenging
problem from another area. Read Science, Nature, PNAS, Chemical Reviews, JACS, Chemistry & Biology, Cell
and anything else that interests you. Search through PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/) to see
what’s been done previously. What are the problems people are grappling with and solving? Who are the
scientists you admire? What are they doing? What can you do that’s different and insightful?
After you finish screaming “Eureka!” at the top of your lungs, the real work begins. Dig into the
literature, and learn the field. You need to know the state-of-the-art knowledge in the area you propose.
Relevant prior experiments should be dissected, and put into the framework of your proposal. You must
propose an original idea. The TA and I will do a literature search in the area you propose, and will give low
(failing) marks to unoriginal proposals. If there are similar experiments described in the literature, you need to
explain the innovation of your proposal