An intractable problem faced Elias Zerhouni when he became director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 6 years ago: The agency's corps of more than 20,000 independent investigators was getting old. The average age at which researchers receive their first NIH research grant had been creeping up for decades. (It is now 42.) Zerhouni saw this as a crisis and tackled it head on. After probing the data, he launched an experiment. Instead of relying solely on peer review to apportion grants, he set a floor—a numerical quota—for the number of awards made to new investigators in 2007 and 2008.
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Jocelyn Kaiser (2008) studied this question.