Originally dreamed up by Dominic Cummings, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has been tasked with a high-risk, high-reward approach to research funding
By Thomas Lewton
11 September 2023
ARIA plans to take a new approach to science funding
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The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has chosen eight scientists who will each be given up to £50 million to allocate as they see fit, in the hopes that a high-risk, high-reward approach to research funding will deliver results that benefit UK society and fuel economic growth. But will it work?
ARIA is the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, an adviser to former UK prime minister Boris Johnson who has long wanted to shake up UK science funding. “A small group of people can make a huge breakthrough with little money but the right structure, the right ways of thinking,” Cummings wrote in 2017.
He was inspired by the US’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which spurred computer science as a discipline and created a forerunner of the internet in the 1960s and 1970s. It did this, in the words of one of its leading scientists, by having “visions rather than goals” and because it “funded people, not projects”.
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While Cummings has long departed government, his plan is coming to fruition today as ARIA announces its eight programme directors. Like ARPA, the new agency is focused on empowering “scientific talent” in ways that “can change the course of the future”, says its CEO, Ilan Gur. “We were set up to focus on drastically improving the quality of life and economic growth in the UK.”
It is unclear how this differs from existing government funding agencies, however. For example, UK Research and Innovation says its vision is “build a thriving, inclusive research and innovation system that connects discovery to prosperity and public good”. UKRI’s £25 billion budget over three years dwarfs that of ARIA, which has an initial allocation of £800 million over four years.
Perhaps then the benefit of ARIA will come from the specific people it is investing in. The first cohort of programme directors are an eclectic bunch, often with experience working across disparate fields of scientific research.