What We Learned Doing Fast Grants

We were very positively surprised at the quality of the applications (Page 6)

we were surprised that many entities continued with something close to “business as usual” rather than switching to emergency pandemic mode (Page 8)

there are probably too few smart administrators in mainstream institutions trusted with flexible budgets that can be rapidly allocated without triggering significant red tape or committee-driven consensus (Page 9)

institutional courage (Page 9)

support for science exists in a monocultural and generally conservative form (Page 11)

respondents told us that they spend more than one quarter of their time on grant applications (Page 13)

78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion (Page 13)

Scientists are in the paradoxical position of being deemed the very best people to fund in order to make important discoveries but not so trustworthy that they should be able to decide what work would actually make the most sense! (Page 13)

conservatism is not the preference of the scientists themselves (Page 13)