Last month, China’s principal science funder selected 44 young researchers (all under 35) and committed to funding them for up to 15 years with no short-term performance reviews. India should adopt a version of this, taking the sensible bits and leaving out the rest.

China’s process does have some checks. The funding comes in five-year chunks, and only a proportion of the researchers carry on at the end of the five- and ten-year marks. The amounts increase with each funding block; so, most of the funding comes in at the end.

The best data on long-term grants comes from the US where a private foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), funds scientists for many years. When you compare the output of HHMI researchers with that of their peers in similar fields, you find that they produce almost double the number of papers in the top 1% by citations. They also have more “failures”, as you would expect when tackling harder problems. HHMI is by no means a hands-off funder. Every few years, an external panel of experts examines each researcher’s five best papers. Approximately one in six lose their funding at the first review and over one in four at the second. The experts look at the work as a whole, not as a tick-box list.

What happens over 15 years with no such reviews at all ought to be studied. China is currently running that experiment.

Long grants can go wrong in two ways, other than the factor of the scientist(s) involved. The first is what happens when the funding stops. A 2026 study of........

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