How Should We Fund Science?

The institutions that fund science are in favor of research, evidence, risk-taking, and openness.  Yet the structures we use to fund science are generally not evidence-based, and concerns abound that traditional funding mechanisms are biased towards funding low-risk, incremental research.  Very little academic research is available to inform the question of how best to fund science, and the academic research that is available tends to be quite narrowly focused – e.g. estimating how many publications are produced by the marginal NIH grant – rather than speaking to broad questions about how best to structure the system we use to fund science.  This panel will discuss these and related issues, with an eye towards highlighting opportunities for research.