Interesting article about whether funding should go to scientists with reputations, or to excellent projects…
Prompted by a question from Times science correspondent Hannah Devlin on Twitter, some thoughts on whether science funders should concentrate on funding people or funding projects… There appears to be growing interest in the idea of channeling funding through individuals. In the last few years, we’ve seen the Wellcome Trust redirect money towards people. EPSRC and other research councils are interested too. Paul Nurse and other senior scientist … Read More
via Responsible Innovation
This entry was posted on July 19, 2011 at 11:55 am and is filed under Finance, Science Politics with tags funding, Science Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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In the Dark 
July 21, 2011 at 11:53 am
Hmmmm …….. what one might call the “Bob Geldof” approach to funding …….. “I am Prof Bloggs, famous physicist/chemist/ computer scientist/whatever: give me your money”? I am not convinced, having sat through peer review panels where the discussion went something like “This is an excellently written proposal; it explains what the investigator proposes to do and why, and how the results will be analysed; but … the applicant is young and has no track record….” compared with “This proposal is appallingly badly written, doesn’t explain anything but ….. we know if we give X some money he’ll do something good with it”. *
The questions that raises for me are: how will the bright young person, who knows they have no track record and need to make their case meticulously, ever get started? And who will call time on the once-productive but now past-their-sell-by-date academics?
I have also not infrequently heard statements of the “This will revolutionise science if it succeeds, but it’s very risky” variety. So how can the peers doing the reviewing be persuaded to take risks? They tend towards conservativsm especially when funding is tight. In some ways, I think it can be argued that giving money to individuals without prescribing their programme is in fact a disguised way of taking risks: the individual can pursue what catches their interest without being constrined by the need to produce deliverables, and those awarding the money can take risks without appearing to do so.
*P.S. There was an excellent THES column by Laurie Taylor many years ago that reported on what purported to be a typical grant-awarding-committee discussion ….