In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a 33-year-old software engineer at Europe’s largest Physics Laboratory (CERN), was frustrated with how the Internet would only enable sharing of information between clients and a single server. Doing anything more required establishing a new connection. To get around this, Berners-Lee had a creative idea—use a hypertext system that would elegantly connect machines and servers across a ‘world wide Web.’

Like any researcher, Berners-Lee had to find support to work on his idea. He wrote up a 14-page proposal and sent it to his boss at CERN, Mike Sendall, who famously scribbled the following on the front-page: “Vague, but exciting….”

We are all very lucky that Berners-Lee was in a time and place that gave the young engineer some latitude to pursue his vague but creative idea, one that would ultimately change the world. If Berners-Lee submitted that idea to government funding agencies for support, who knows where the Internet would be today?

Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman once said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Today, however, the hundreds of billions of dollars of government funding that supports the world's academic research ecosystem is distributed based almost exclusively on the opinions of senior experts (or ‘peers’). These experts review proposals and seek to find ideas impervious to criticism. Unfortunately, a research idea that is immune to criticism during peer review will, by its very nature, be cautious and take minimal risks.

Rather than have peers assess the innovative potential of an idea, preliminary data and publication records are now the dominant parts of the evaluation. Funding is so tight and proposals are so heavily critiqued that any one reviewer can kill a grant proposal based on arbitrary metrics of quality—or even if they suspect the idea just won’t work.

Yet relying only on peer-review misses something about the nature of scientific innovation: some of the biggest discoveries are deemed crazy or impossible by experts at the time.

It’s difficult to imagine, but in fact the majority of ‘experts’ in the 1980s thought Berners-Lee's idea was crazy. In Berners-Lee’s own words, “for a huge number of people, if you suggested a hypertext link which went across the planet, people would express deep, deep skepticism." The current peer review system would have likely killed Berners-Lee’s idea, particularly if a reviewer called it “vague.”

Tighter budgets, coupled with this approach to peer-review, means that vague but exciting ideas proposed by young, inexperienced researchers simply can’t compete against safe, incremental ideas from established scientists.

This huge, inadvertent shift toward conservatism and safety has created an enormous creativity deficit in science that affects us all. There’s no lack of brilliant, passionate creative researchers; the current peer-review system just doesn’t seem to fund enough of them.

The rewards of safe ideas

In 1986, Dennis Slamon, a young oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, had a novel idea for a new avenue of cancer research. It was unconventional at the time, but if he were right, the rewards would be huge.

“A lot of places were still using traditional approaches to treating cancer,” Slamon said, according to Cure Today, which was to use various chemotherapeutic drugs and radiation.” Instead of focusing on better treatment of cancer, Slamon wanted to examine the basic science of how cells progressed from normal to malignant. Rather than focus on the things that all cancers have in common, he wanted to test different types of cancer growth to ask a fundamental research question: were there any obvious genetic differences between tumor A and tumor B?

The problem was, he couldn’t find funding. He eventually found some small private seed money from the American Cancer Society. With the help of a researcher at Californian biotech company Genetech, he started genetically mapping the changes in different tumor tissues.

After looking at a variety of cancers, he noticed a group of breast cancers that stood out. “When we got to the breast cancer specimens, we found that this gene HER2, which was a growth factor receptor, was broken in about 25 percent of breast cancers,” he said.

Some women have an overabundance of this HER2 protein, which acts like an antenna on the outside of breast cells, detecting growth signals. The extra copies of the HER2 gene amplified the growth of tumors, making them the most lethal type of breast cancer known.

When the 38-year-old Slamon published this finding in 1987, many senior oncology experts didn’t believe the results. Slamon was undeterred; he knew his results were authentic.

The next step was to develop an antibody that could block the HER2 protein and then test it on humans, but he needed serious funding for that. So in 1989, he wrote a proposal asking for money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The world’s largest government-funded science agency, the NIH has an annual budget of about $30 billion today. But after reviewing Slamon’s grant, the NIH rejected it.

With so many ideas competing for limited government science funds, rejection is common for most scientists. The NIH rejects more than five out of every six ideas. In 2013 for example, of the 28,044 research ideas proposed, just 4,902 got funding. For cancer-focused research, the odds are even worse.

But there is a hidden trick that betters your chances of funding. “Everyone familiar with NIH operations knows that it is extremely difficult to obtain funding for groundbreaking, high-risk research,” writes Professor Andrew Marks, director of the Center for Molecular Cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center. “Indeed, the unwritten rule, often said tongue-in-cheek, is that when applying for NIH funding, one should only propose experiments that one has already done and for which one can show convincing preliminary data.”

Instead of proposing risky, creative ideas when looking for research funds, scientists now tend to pitch ideas that are safer and already proven.

“There’s a current problem in biomedical research,” says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “The emphasis is on doing things which are not risky. To have a grant proposal funded, you have to propose something and then present what is called preliminary data, which is basically evidence that you’ve already done what you’re proposing to do. If there’s any risk involved, then your proposal won’t be funded. So the entire system tends to encourage not particularly creative research, relatively descriptive and incremental changes which are incremental advances which you are certain to make but not change things very much."

Slamon’s idea was too unorthodox to be funded through the peer-reviewed system at the NIH. After the organization rejected his grant proposal, Slamon’s work was perilously close to dying a premature death. Genentech wasn’t interested anymore either, as it was cutting R&D. In the end the researcher caught a bit of luck, and two philanthropists backed Slamon’s research.

“People didn’t think our approach would work,” Slamon told Cure Today. “I think the skepticism was from people who were looking at things more traditionally, [which made] funding difficult in the beginning, but we had a donor who believed in us in Ron Perelman from Revlon and Lilly Tartikoff from Los Angeles, who really raised money to make this program survive in the early days.”

The funds allowed Slamon to conduct the first trials at UCLA in 1991 to 1992, where they tested an antibody that blocked HER2, an antibody later known as the drug Herceptin. The first human trials were a success. Genentech eventually came back to help.

“Herceptin is an antibody directed against this protein that sits over the antennae like a lead blanket to stop its signal,” said Slamon. By 1998, Herceptin became publicly available and has since changed the lives of tens of thousands of breast cancer patients. They’ve gone from having one of the worst outcomes to one of the best.

Many regard Slamon’s cancer breakthrough as one of the top discoveries in the war on cancer. Yet if it were up to the NIH, his HER2 project would have died, laid to rest by the institutional bias against unorthodox, creative research ideas. (Or, it at least would have spent years in hibernation as other evidence about the gene built up.)

Ironically, once HER2’s role in cancer was established, studying it was no longer risky. The NIH has poured research funds into it. Between 2000 and 2010, more than five hundred grants worth $253 million were awarded to hundreds of scientists to study the gene. The story of Herceptin is one example, but the problem is systemic.

“A truly innovative idea cannot be judged by peers: if it is truly innovative, no peer has any clue about it; if peers already know about it, it is not innovative” said John Ioannidis, head of the Stanford Prevention Research Centre in California. Ioannidis and others published a recent analysis called "Conform and be Funded" where they show that safer, established ideas have a much better chance of being funded at the NIH than novel, creative ones.

To be fair, the bias against any risk is not limited to the NIH; it occurs across every governmental science agency globally. For instance, Britain’s and Australia’s Research Councils only use peer-review and standard metrics to reward scientists, which encourages only the safest ideas and ensures that only the most experienced researchers can secure funding.