NSFC, China's national science fund, awarded 44 young scientists fifteen-year grants with no interim reports: the only condition is staying in the lab, and funding doubles at year five and again at year ten
NSFC, China's national science fund, awarded 44 young scientists fifteen-year grants with no interim reports: the only condition is staying in the lab, and funding doubles at year five and again at year ten
On 19 September 2026, at a scientific forum, the director of China's National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC) announced that the fund had selected 44 researchers under the age of 35 (nine based abroad, more than thirty in China) and committed to funding each of them for 15 years with no interim reports of any kind. The only condition for the entire term is physical presence in the laboratory, and the budget doubles automatically after the first five years and again after the next five.
According to the fund's director, Dou Xiangkang, about 90% of NSFC project leaders are already young scientists, and three quarters of the fund's money goes to researchers under 45. But that money came in short tranches with annual reporting requirements: young scientists had to compete for every new grant, and few managed to carry an idea through to a result.
Dou Xiangkang, an atmospheric physicist and former president of Wuhan University, took over as head of NSFC in April 2023 and immediately set about reforming the fund's flagship program for talented young researchers, the Distinguished Young Scholars program. Starting in 2024, after the first five years the top 20% of projects by evaluation receive doubled funding, up to 8 million yuan, for the next five-year term. After the second five-year period, the top 50% of projects receive 16 million yuan for a third term.
The new 2026 program takes this same architecture to its limit: it removes even the interim evaluation, leaving physical presence in the laboratory as the sole criterion. The age threshold of 35 was chosen with the same reasoning: support is needed while the scientist is still full of energy and has not lost the drive to do research, before those years are consumed by the chase for grants.
"We don't care about quick results. We just need you to settle in and stay in the lab," Dou Xiangkang said.
The September announcement is the latest link in a chain of decisions made by one person over three years. In November 2023, the fund had already proposed a similar but narrower program offering up to 28 million yuan over 15 years for the most gifted researchers. In May 2026, it expanded its main grant fund for young researchers by 12,000 projects, an increase of over 50%.
NSFC's total Natural Science Fund allocation for 2026 is 41.86 billion yuan, roughly 6.15 billion dollars, covering all of China's basic science. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which fund only biomedicine, received 47.5 billion dollars for 2026, nearly eight times as much.
China is placing a fifteen-year bet on 44 people with a budget that is inherently smaller than that of a single specialized U.S. agency, and it is doing so at precisely the moment when its competitor's predictability is collapsing: the number of annual NIH grant competition announcements dropped from the usual 780 to a dozen following the political reversal of 2025.
This principle has an older and more modest precursor. The private American Howard Hughes Medical Institute describes its philosophy as funding "people, not projects": a selected scientist receives the title of Investigator, a seven-year contract with full salary that is indefinitely renewable upon successful review. "HHMI lets you pursue high-risk, potentially high-reward science without worrying about short deadlines and grant cycles," biologist Susan Lindquist, who studied prions and protein folding, said of her Investigator status. NSFC is transplanting this logic to the scale of an entire country and doubling the horizon to 15 years.