A recent letter to the Financial Times, signed by a number of prominent British and American scientists, decries the growth of "third-party assessments such as peer review" as inimical to radical scientific innovation. Leaving aside arguments about the degree to which "normal" versus "revolutionary" science differ, or can be prospectively identified and supported, the letter is another piece of evidence that a growing number of scientists see the traditional structures that regulated and rewarded their work:

Scientific advances are not predictable. Lasers, nuclear power, transistors, computers, antibiotics, molecular biology, for example, all took us by surprise. Luckily, for most of the 20th century scientists could usually pursue their own agenda, and we could enjoy science’s prodigious harvest. But success led to increasing numbers of scientists so that by the 1970s there were more than the funding agencies could support. In response, they required researchers to submit written proposals from which they selected the best, a policy that works well enough for the mainstream but fails at the margins where unpredictable and transformative discoveries are made.

Third-party assessments such as peer review would have been anathema to, say, Planck, Einstein, Avery, Townes, Crick and Watson, Kendrew, Perutz and about 300 others of similar calibre – we call them the Planck Club – whose work dominated the 20th century. However, their modern successors cannot escape them. In spite of increasing investments since 1970, there has been a dearth of new science. This is now a severe problem. As [economist Robert] Solow proved, we curb the supply of new science at our economic peril. However, current policies ensure we are doing that.

Science does not lack opportunity. There are few, if any, fields that we fully understand. The potential for growth is therefore as high as it was 100 years ago, say, but we will create a 21st-century Planck Club and its attendant harvest of unpredicted breakthroughs only if we can restore the freedom that leads to them.

There is a proven way of doing this. Costs would be relatively low – some $20m-$30m a year for a global scheme – but as prospective peer review must be excluded, it is probably too radical a solution for national funding agencies alone. There may be other ways forward such as, for example, collaboration between private investors and national agencies.

Three things are interesting here. First, the letter is signed by several Nobel laureates and other luminaries: this isn't a complaint by junior people whose careers are squeezed. Second, they acknowledge the radicalness of the a system in which traditional review mechanisms are suspended in favor of extreme, potentially paradigm-changing, freedom. Finally, $20-30 million is well within the reach of a handful of entrepreneurs. No one would want to fund this privately, but a consortium of people? If you know the right people, that wouldn't be that hard to do.