WASHINGTON -- Some of history’s major scientific and technological breakthroughs started as research projects with little promise of bearing fruit, but funding for “high risk, high reward” research has always been difficult to secure. In an economic downturn, finding money for these projects is likely to be even more challenging.

“Funding for failures is not easy to justify in an era of ballooning deficits,” Rep. Daniel Lipinski said at a hearing of the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education Thursday.

While Lipinski laid out the stark challenges for funding, a panel of scientists spent nearly two hours Thursday telling the Illinois Democrat that high-risk research is, well, worth the risk. Such research helped develop laser technology and the Internet, advances that took a considerable amount of time but easily proved a return on the investment.

“Breakthroughs often occur as total surprises,” said Neal Lane, a professor and senior fellow at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “The research that was being done may strike us as somewhat routine, somewhat dull and suddenly there’s a surprise that comes out of the research.”

The problem, however, is that researchers seldom have the freedom to pursue big ideas that don’t fit neatly into grant proposals for the National Institutes of Health or other funding agencies, panelists told the subcommittee. Moreover, they often lack funding to investigate whether the germ of a big idea has promise. The well-known mantra for researchers, therefore, is “don’t put it in your grant proposal unless you know it will work," said Lane, former director of the National Science Foundation.

So what is the solution? Some researchers argue that federal agencies should be required to set aside a portion of their grant funds for high risk or “transformational” research. Others suggest that rather than funding specific projects -- a paradigm that encourages researchers to play it safe in proposals -- funding agencies should provide money to promising investigators with no strings attached. That’s essentially the model of the MacArthur “genius” grants, and it’s also used by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Gerald Rubin, vice president and director of the Hughes institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus, told the subcommittee that Congress is more likely to see successful high risk research if they fund “people, not projects.”

“We’re not going to tell you what to do with the money,” Rubin said of the model. “We’re betting on you as an individual, and we’re going to win or lose that bet.”

While investigators lament the relative dearth of funds for high risk research, agencies like the NIH have announced moves to fund such projects. Last month, the NIH said it would award $348 million in 2009 for high risk research. Lipinski suggested Thursday that the pending re-authorization of the National Science Foundation and upcoming competitiveness legislation offer other opportunities to bolster funding for riskier projects.