We need DARPA

There has a been an uproar of criticism of DARPA by the Senate over their recent terrorism futures market. DARPA is the goverment agency that funds speculative research, most famously including the internet.

The editorial in this weeks Nature comes to their defense:

[DARPA's] funding decisions are determined not by peer review, but by the whims of programme managers, usually seconded from academia or industry. Their sole guidance is DARPA's mission of backing imaginative, creative and high-risk research in the interest of the defence of the United States. Scientists who capture the imagination of a programme manager can gain support for projects that would be dismissed by other agencies as too speculative to win public funding.

This freewheeling approach has yielded some big payoffs, such as the radar-absorbing skin of 'stealth' aircraft, and a host of critical Internet technologies. Today, the agency is pioneering the development of spintronics and quantum computing, which together could transform information technology. It has also extended its innovative reach into systems neuroscience, and other areas of biology.

(Nature 424, 599 (07 August 2003); doi:10.1038/424599a, registration required.)

The U.S. needs a program like DARPA. I applied for a National Science Foundation grant last year for my project. I was doing things in a non-traditional way. It was turned down with a "we don't think that will work." I'm disappointed to see that the NSF has come to only fund research that is sure to work. (See my earlier post on how I do research, for more on that topic.)

We need a way for more speculative basic research to get funded. In this country, DARPA is often that route. At a conference on goverment funding I attended, the DARPA woman said that they can get you a check in two weeks if they like what you're doing. That's pretty amazing compared to the NSF's once a year grant cycle.