Paul Nurse on Funding

Paul Nurse suggests that funding agencies should pick out about 100 researchers from various fields to receive large, long-term grants, reports the UK's Times. Nurse, who received the 2001 Nobel prize in medicine, was nominated Friday to lead Britain's Royal Society, which has a £3.2 billion budget. "It is an interesting paradox, because we have quite a lot of people in the scientific endeavor, but not so many of them are people who are moving things significantly forward," Nurse tells the Times. "Much of the work is worthy, but the question is, do we have enough at that top end who make real discoveries? Are we attracting enough people there, and are we resourcing them enough?"