Wellcome News 61 editorial

At the heart of scientific advance is individual creativity, and our responsibility as a funder is to create space and opportunity for this to occur. We want to provide the researchers we fund with the means to take on challenging research questions. We are therefore establishing a new scheme - the Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards - to replace our existing project and programme grant schemes. These emphasise flexibility and individually tailored support, and will mean that we will fund larger grants that can deliver our resources more strategically and effectively, and in a way that will bring a greater impact from our funding.

So why change our funding methods? To sum up our thinking, I offer you two quotes that I am sure will resonate with many researchers. The first, from Sydney Brenner - "It is only through the use of subterfuge such as applying for money for work already done that innovative research can be freely pursued" (Science, 1998) - aptly describes the problems of project and programme grants, which require applicants to prescribe in detail what they intend to achieve and do not readily embrace the unexpected twists and turns that research often takes. Furthermore, as many of our project grants are funded for only three years, it requires researchers to submit multiple, successive applications.

Contrast this with Joshua Lederberg's comment: "simply put, the best way to administer a creative research environment is to find people of great talent and reasonable ambition - whatever their specific disciplines - and leave them to their own devices" (The Scientist, 1991). This is the essence of our Investigator Awards, which will provide substantial long-term support to the very best researchers and their teams, and will give them the freedom to explore riskier, more speculative lines of enquiry.

We already take this approach for our successful and popular Fellowship schemes, which provide researchers with the resources and flexibility to pursue their individual vision. A key difference, of course, is that our Fellowships are not open to researchers with established positions; now, through Investigator Awards, we will be bringing this ethos to a wider community of researchers who are salaried by their university or research institute.

Studies of the age at which researchers publish the discoveries that are later recognised by major awards, such as Lasker and Gairdner Awards and Nobel Prizes, show a peak of creative output for individual researchers in their late 30s, though the spread is wide. It is a paradox that it is precisely the researchers who are at the peak of their creativity who find it hard to obtain project and programme grants and, in the USA, RO1 grants from the National Institutes of Health. For this reason we will be offering two categories - Investigator Awards and Senior Investigator Awards - for researchers at different stages of their careers; the former will be targeted specifically at creative researchers at the start of their independent research careers.

The Awards will open for applications in October 2010. We will also be offering two final rounds of project and programme grants in 2010/11 before the final closure of these schemes. Wellcome Trust Investigators, Senior Investigators and fellows will be able to apply for Enhancement Awards, which will provide additional funding to explore new opportunities that arise as their work unfolds, or to support significant unanticipated costs such as access to equipment or resources. Furthermore, as part of the Trust's commitment to developing a community of research leaders, we are exploring opportunities to offer tailored leadership training to those who would benefit from it.

Over time, we believe that backing talented researchers who can demonstrate a clear scientific vision, creativity and potential for leadership, rather than a skill in methodological detail and the traditional conventions of grant writing, will be the best strategy to generate breakthrough improvements in global health.

Mark Walport
Director of the Wellcome Trust