Scientific Freedom

Why it’s on the list: Braben ran BP’s Venture Research programme, which funded researchers rather than projects and asked only whether the idea could change the way we think. The book is his case that peer review and grant competition have quietly made the highest-variance science unfundable — reissued by Stripe Press in 2020, which is how it reached this audience.

Where I saw it: A link to the Stripe Press edition, saved in the note — alongside the NSF’s 75th-anniversary edition of Vannevar Bush’s Science, The Endless Frontier.

Also recommended in the reply thread to Sarah Guo’s March 22, 2025 question on X — “is there a book / essay about environments that best support scientific discovery? Not about specifically bell labs, cavendish, xerox parc, los alamos - but why these places were so productive?” Kyle reconstructed the full reply-thread list on 2026-09-17; it is on Is There a Book… (tweet).

Connections

• Scientific Research — the subject: how the funding mechanism selects what gets discovered.
• Science, The Endless Frontier — saved next to it in the note; Bush’s 1945 report is the founding document of the system Braben is criticising.
• Bell Labs · The Idea Factory — the institution and the book most often held up as the counter-model.
• Technological Innovation · Open Source Knowledge — the portfolio ideas this sits across.