Otto Warburg (1883 – 1970), the famous German biochemist and Nobel laureate, is often creditet for having written the perfect, the ideal research grant. I just stumbled into a ‘reconstruction’ of his classic application to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science, the fore runner of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), probably in 1921. The application consisted of a single sentence, ‘I require 10,000 marks’ and was fully funded. It was (re)printed in a review in Nature Cancer Reviews  entiteled ‘Otto Warburg’s contributions to current concepts of cancer metabolism’ by Koppenol et al. Thanks! Those were the days!