The fundamental science review looked at the appropriate balance, and they took an ecosystem approach. Applied, obviously, it has great value and brings a lot to the country, so what's the best ecosystem? How do you have everything thrive across the ecosystem?
It talked about a ratio of investments in applied versus basic, a seventy-thirty ratio. Again, it's not hard and fast, but it's a ratio that through the best research and evidence shows the most thriving ecosystem. To make up for that, they called for the number they are asking in the report, which we're welcoming. It's an increase of $485 million over four years in investigator-led research.
Part of the analogy is that you plant how many trees to get the fruit? I think John Polanyi who you all may know won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1986, put it this way when he said, “the edifice of innovation cannot be built on a foundation subject to neglect.” It is about that balance and moving it toward the bigger balance within the research ecosystem to have the marketplace innovations we've seen, the commercialization components, but also the knowledge generation.
The last part on this is that the discovery research, the “blue sky” research as you called it, isn't only obviously beneficial for a market. It's also beneficial for our other challenges we face to innovate both in policy and practice to understand what's happening when we're looking at reconciliation, mass migration, thriving cultural industries, etc. All of these things require fundamental blue-sky research. That's fundamental science.