In defense of the fishing expedition

When coming back from a conference recently, I had an interesting conversation with my PI about grantsmanship and in particular on why on earth do federal funding agencies in the US still refuse to fund exploratory science, or, in grantsmanship parlance, so called “fishing expeditions”. While almost every single paper in C/N/S level journals in biomedical sciences has some kind of microarray analysis in it, the decision-makers at NIH still fail to acknowledge the importance of such studies.