Encourage Risk in Research

says a panel headed by Thomas Cech who just left the directorship of HHMI to pursue research. From Encourage Risk, Help Young Researchers, Panel Advises ( the article needs subscription):
"Tight budgets have done more than restrict research; they're damaging morale by making people afraid to take chances, just when it's more important than ever to invest in what could be "transformative" research, a new report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences argues. "The constant hunt for dollars is fostering conservative thinking" and thus making a bad situation worse, according to a panel headed by Thomas Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Formed to look at "alternative models for the federal funding of science," the 22-person committee "quickly drilled down" to two messages, says panel member Keith Yamamoto of the University of California, San Francisco: the need to foster early-career scientists and to encourage high-risk research. Released this week, the white paper Advancing Research in Science and Engineering is styled as a follow-on to a National Academy of Sciences report (Rising Above the Gathering Storm) issued in 2005. "This report addresses a very serious set of problems," says Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C.
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In what Cech calls its "single most controversial recommendation," the report says institutions should find ways to help researchers with their salaries rather than relying on them to support themselves entirely with grant money--an arrangement that makes them more risk averse.
The report eschews calls for increased funding, focusing instead on how to get the most out of existing research dollars. One suggestion to universities: "Limit excessive building programs" in order to make more money available for promising investigators."
I have seen this process of going for safe research in many universities. Luckily when I started in 1964, some autonomous institutes like TIFR and ISI encouraged quality and there were cases of researchers promoted on the basis of one excellent paper in 5 years without any more papers. Salaries were about 250 rupees a month to begin with with the promise of a regular job with a basic salary of over 400 rupees or so if we were confirmed at the end of first year. 250 Rs. a month was not too bad those days but I started borrowing money from Raghavan Narasimhan who was in charge of our batch. The interviews were brought forward by six months and all in our batch were confirmed. Good beginning salaries and encouragement to learn and focus on good problems seemed to have helped. Once one had a few resonable papers, even change of jobs did not seem to put undue pressure.