The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has chosen eight scientists who will each be given up to £50 million to allocate as they see fit, in the hopes that a high-risk, high-reward approach to research funding will deliver results that benefit UK society and fuel economic growth. ARIA is the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, an adviser to former UK prime minister Boris Johnson who has long wanted to shake up UK science funding. "A small group of people can make a huge breakthrough with little money but the right structure, the right ways of thinking," Cummings wrote in 2017. He was inspired by the US's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which spurred computer science as a discipline and created a forerunner of the internet in the 1960s and 1970s. It did this, in the words of one of its leading scientists, by having "visions rather than goals" and because it "funded people, not projects".