I suspect that in many fields, funding acts as a fertility drug for researchers. The opportunities to fund research are, accordingly, pretty much always going t

I suspect that in many fields, funding acts as a fertility drug for researchers. The opportunities to fund research are, accordingly, pretty much always going to outstrip any amount of funding that could be provided. If that's the case, you're inevitably going to need some way to decide which of the many worthy opportunities merit sufficient investment and which ones do not.