The $1.5 Billion Fairy Tale: Why Swapping the Grant for "X-Labs" Will Feed Serfdom

 

A well-known researcher whom I cited in a paper I submitted last month to Accountability in Research has now published an interesting article in Science. He accepts that research grants are bureaucratic, conservative and wasteful of scientists’ time, but warns against seductively romanticising the “X-Labs” now being promoted as their replacement. His central point is that block-funded institutes do not abolish bureaucracy; they risk creating new hierarchies, entrenched rigidities and unaccountable concentrations of institutional power and patronage. Grants, for all their defects, still preserve something essential: scientific mobility, intellectual independence, multiple routes to funding and the graduate education system on which future science depends. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aej2947?

The occasion is not a minor one. The US National Science Foundation has just committed a strategic $1.5 billion over a decade to these independent, milestone-driven institutes — organisations designed to bypass not only the traditional grant system, but also, more unsettlingly, the universities that remain the institutional engine of almost all the country’s basic science.

For my part, I would like to recall my own posts from 2023, because I have already walked the other side of this argument, and I am not about to pretend otherwise.In The Economist’s “The World Ahead 2024” — what constitutes the most efficient method for financing scientific endeavours? I argued that any honest discussion had to begin with the cost of the existing system. That cost is not merely financial. That post opened with the great unspoken scandal of the grant system: the sheer amount of human life it consumes. Australian researchers, in a single year, collectively spent an astonishing 614 years writing grant applications.

The post then examined the alternatives. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, founded in 1953, stands apart precisely because it funds researchers, not projects — generously, for seven years or more — and then largely leaves them alone. The result? Nearly twice as many highly cited articles as the standard funding model, and a record that includes more than thirty Nobel prizes. The success was so difficult to ignore that it helped inspire, in 2021, the creation of a new research institute at Stanford — the Arc Institute — built on a similar principle.

So should I now applaud the National Science Foundation for finally seeing the light and writing a $1.5 billion cheque to the "fund people, not projects" ? I should not — and here is the distinction the reformers are careful never to draw. What made Howard Hughes work was never that it was an institute. It was that it was a private foundation that selected ruthlessly for excellence, held its people to account, and retained the courage to let them go. A state-run X-Lab, handed to the very incumbents who built the present bureaucracy, will do the precise opposite. Block funding does not abolish bureaucracy it shelters it. It is the institutional cousin of that obscene rubber stamp in my own country: a country whose last scientific Nobel Prize dates back more than 70 years, but where the machinery of self-congratulation has somehow discovered that  75% of research units were classified as "Excellent or Very Good" !!! 

This is why the author I cited is right, though for a reason he barely dares to state plainly: the grant’s one redeeming virtue is that it follows the scientist. A researcher trapped under a feudal director can still walk out and take the money with them. That portability — not block funding, not institutional palaces, not another taxpayer-financed grotesque sanctuary for incumbents — is the only serious antidote to academic serfdom academia has ever devised.

O recorde mundial de mais de 10 anos da Universidade de Harvard acaba de ser batido por uma universidade Chinesa

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-day-harvard-lost-first-place-and.html

No post acessível no link supra, comentei para os meus leitores estrangeiros — em especial os dos EUA e da Alemanha, que nos últimos tempos têm sido os que mais visitam o meu blogue — que a famosa universidade de Harvard, por muitos anos ídolo científico do Ocidente e símbolo máximo da sua autoconfiança académica, acaba de perder o primeiro lugar do Nature Index 2026 para a Zhejiang University. O prestígio acumulado não publica artigos, não cria massa crítica nem garante liderança nenhuma; apenas anestesia quem prefere viver da reputação passada em vez de olhar para os números do presente.

Recordo que não foi certamente por acaso que, desde 2021, venho defendendo a necessidade de uma colaboração estratégica muito mais intensa entre as universidades portuguesas e as universidades chinesas. No texto abaixo, identifiquei frontalmente as instituições nacionais que mais cedo perceberam a importância dessas parcerias — e, por contraste, aquelas que, por crassa ignorância ou grossa incompetência, continuaram presas a colaborações com países irremediavelmente pouco ou mesmo nada competitivos. https://pachecotorgal.com/2023/07/29/colaboracoes-internacionais-das-instituicoes-de-ensino-superior__negligencia-ou-incompetencia/

Há dois anos, a minha percentagem de publicações, na conhecida base de literatura científica indexada Scopus, em coautoria com investigadores chineses era de 17%. Entretanto, subiu para 19%. Não se trata de um mero detalhe estatístico: é um indicador de alinhamento com uma transformação profunda da ciência mundial. E é uma percentagem muito superior à de vários investigadores portugueses altamente citados, que continuam, por conta de uma inexplicável miopia estratégica, a aproveitar de forma manifestamente insuficiente a extraordinária ascensão científica da China. https://pachecotorgal.com/2024/12/08/estarao-os-investigadores-mais-citados-de-portugal-a-aproveitar-devidamente-a-notavel-ascensao-da-ciencia-chinesa/

Harvard University Falls from First Place for the First Time in More Than a Decade

 

For the first time in more than a decade, Harvard University is no longer the world’s leading university for high-quality research output, according to one influential index. In the Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders rankings, first place among universities now belongs to Zhejiang University. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3356931/chinas-zhejiang-university-tops-harvard-nature-index-world-academic-rankings

This is not a routine reshuffling of a league table. It is another sign that the symbolic geography of global science is being redrawn. Harvard remains an extraordinary institution — that is not in question. The real question is what a ranking like this actually measures. Pure scientific excellence? Or scale, state strategy, institutional concentration, funding power and the capacity to transform thousands of researchers into visible, countable, indexed output?

This is not the first warning. In an earlier post, The Decline of the Great American Research University, I argued that China’s rise should be taken seriously without being romanticised. It reflects strategic investment, institutional scale and aggressive talent attraction, but also a system still burdened by research-integrity problems and real limits to deep, original creativity. That is exactly why Harvard’s fall is so revealing: not because China has solved the problem of scientific excellence, but because the West has spent too long pretending that inherited prestige could substitute for strategy.

Scientific leadership is not inherited like an aristocratic title; it is built — won by those who invest, plan, protect talent, concentrate resources, and create systems capable of producing knowledge at scale. For decades the West admired its reflection in rankings it largely designed, assuming the world would stay permanently cast as supplier, imitator, or junior partner from a permanently subordinate position. That comfort is now becoming expensive. 

The myth that weakened this week is not that the West still does great science — of course it does — but that it would always do the best science simply because it once did. That is not confidence; it is intellectual laziness dressed as civilisation, marketed as historical inevitability. Real decline begins there: defending superiority with memories, slogans, and institutional nostalgia while others build their future with laboratories, researchers, funding, and policy. Prestige can perfume decay with ceremony for a while. It cannot stop the rot.

Declaration of competing interests - I am an editorial board member of the Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A Applied Physics & Engineering 

PS — Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness now reads less like a policy document and more like an early autopsy warning written before the funeral. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/12/where-is-courage-ercs-maria-leptin.html