In his 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, Bush argued that the government should fund “curiosity-driven basic research,” with panels of peer scientists choosing which projects deserved financial support. We should largely zero out the current project-grant system for basic research and replace it with a radically simpler philosophy for supporting unguided curiosity: fund people, not projects. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funds researchers with grants of $10 million over seven years, bets on people rather than projects. Small goal- or mission-oriented projects would be funded through a wide variety of models, along the many lines proposed in the OSTP report. By funding researchers directly with stable, modest support, we can recreate the fertile conditions that historically produced revolutionary advances.