Um, how do you think of solving this problem?

Well, it is kind of a paradox that most of our federal science funding, uh, uh, let's focus particularly on NIH and NSF, uh, is handed out with, you know, strongly based on the recommendations of outside experts who participate in peer review panels at NIH, which are called study sections, or merit review at NSF.

Uh, and that does make a lot of sense for a lot of science.

I mean, uh, science is a kind of social enterprise in which, um, you know, if, if you're doing great science, uh, chances are that other people within your field will recognize that at some point and want to reward that.

At the same time, if you look at the history of true scientific breakthroughs, they're not something that would've been approved by a consensus panel of the peers in that field three to five years ahead of time, right? I mean, imagine if you had, uh, taken a poll of physicists in 1902 and had said, um, "Here's this guy, Albert Einstein, who's a patent clerk.

Uh, should we give him some money to develop his, uh, kind of outside the box ideas?" I mean, chances are that, that it would not have, uh, reached consensus of, of 20 physicists at that time.

And the same can be said for many other, uh, breakthroughs that have happened.

So that, that used to come up in our conversations, and-