Buried in a Wall Street Journal article (thanks Michael) about the lack of involvement of the US presidential candidates in science issues is an interesting statistic:

At the National Institutes of Health, the average age of a first grant is 42 for a Ph.D. and 44 for an M.D.

It’d be interesting to know about NSF too.

Is it that much better here? I don’t know! It would be interesting to see statistics for average ages of grant holders, and first time grant holders for NERC, EPSRC and STFC …

That said, it may well be illegal to hold that information here, and I’m not convinced NERC know how old I am, let alone anyone else. But it would still be interesting … although years since doctoral graduation is probably a better metric which might not be illegal to hold. The latter could only be obtained by survey. Now if only I could convince someone to undertake such a survey …