It is ironic that within one of the world's most notorious bureaucracies, the Department of Defense, resides a tribe of rambunctious technological entrepreneurs. The most serious threat to science under peer review is conservatism the safe squeezing out the novel. IPTO spawned the first departments of computer science, bolstered an academic base for large-scale integrated chip design at a time when that foundation was eroding perilously, and created the prototype for today's Internet. This period has also been a time of remarkable progress in biomedical research, and NIH has played a central role. NIH funding accounts for almost 30 percent of the world's biomedical research literature, compared to about 40 percent from other U.S. sources and about 30 percent from all foreign sources.
Experience suggests otherwise, however.
Nothing was there but a notion that computers could be made to do things they had never done before. Administrative review costs at NIH or NSF rise arithmetically with the number of applications. External costs, however, rise much faster as the percentage of proposals that are funded falls. If half of all proposals result in funding, which was the case at NIH several decades ago, one unfunded grant proposal is prepared for each one funded. When success rates fall to one in five or six, as they have in several areas, four or five proposals are wasted for every one funded.