Here's an interesting piece about what you're real job is when you are a scientist: writing grant proposals. If this piece is to be believed, most of the real creative thinking and analysis on scientific efforts these days is done by grad students. The prof is too busy writing grant proposals to do much real work on the actual project.
The problem seems to be that universities look at scientists as rain makers first, researchers second. So a lot of time gets burned up robo-submitting grant proposals.
And you wonder why our science and technology position in the U.S. is deteriorating.......
http://chronicle.com/article/Science-by-Proxy/124921/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en