To comment on the 40 days to make a grant application, yes that's close to what I used to spend. But the worst part is that on most grants you are not alone. I'

To comment on the 40 days to make a grant application, yes that's close to what I used to spend. But the worst part is that on most grants you are not alone. I'd estimate participation looks like a power law. PI spends most of the time, another or two helpers spent a good week or so. And then the long tail of others that contribute between a tiny paragraph to nothing. Plus you need to take into account the money and personal management, that takes a chunk of the researcher time. And usually you are also part of committees to review grants and this takes a lot of time too and make the system "work". Now science is not a single person thing on most grants, the PI isn't doing much or at all of the lab work and most of it is done by postdocs, PhDs and other non-tenured personnel. So you can't compare with the old days. Another factor is that in the old days, there was a lot of unnamed personnel that was doing the dirty work of setting up experiments, tabulating data, writing and typing the articles and so on. They also often contributed on the "scientific work" itself, but this often was not recognized either.