Are we making more mistakes now? I don't think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science-this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers-if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. It's a funny way to say this. You've got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, you've got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures. (Leon M. Lederman)

Are we making more mistakes now? I don't think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science-this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers-if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. It's a funny way to say this. You've got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, you've got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures.

Leon M. Lederman

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