The professor, his testicles and how to pay for them

You might not know it, but professors are beggars. Every academic at every university is constantly embroiled in a not very pretty scrap for a limited amount of funding. Applications for grants are an incessant, but horribly necessary, hurdle for academics to overcome.

So how do they decide who gets the dosh? It's not a case of names in a hat, but rather a very complicated system of 'peer-review'. A professor's proposal must be vetted by his or her colleagues as to its merit.

The problem is that this process has become a bit of a back-slapping fest and standards aren't as watertight as before. This means that, with everyone having such sparkling reviews, getting funding – a bit like getting into good universities – has become as much down to luck as anything else.

But Sheffield's Prof. Tim Birkhead has a solution. Writing in the THES, Prof. Birkhead suggested that rather than relying on the peer review and the individual merits of the proposal, funding should be based on previous performance.

Prof. Birkhead's logic seems sound. If a researcher has struck academic gold before, he's likely to do so again. However, the problem with this thinking is fundamental: it stifles the new and original.

Under such a system, academics such as Prof. Birkhead, who has had a long, distinguished career (including the quite fantastic 'Testes size in birds: quality vs quantity'), would waltz off with vast amounts of swag from research councils – but the twenty-something post-doc with a big idea would be left skint.

Just because a researcher has been successful, this doesn't necessarily make his or her research worthy of cash. Research councils must continue to give funding on the merit of the proposal, less they become 'old-boys' networks and blinkered to new ideas.

But, think about it, Professor. If you had not received a break when you were younger the world would know far less about birds' testes – and we would all be poorer for it.