If you haven't already, you should read this interesting guest post at Olivia Judson's blog:

Many of the best-known scientists of our day are men and women exceptionally talented in herding the resources — human and otherwise — required to plan, construct and use big sophisticated facilities.

Is that a good thing? The phenomenon is not new: think of Bohr, Rutherford, Bragg - there were many great scientists who were also great administrators. But you also had people who didn't spend much time as administrators, like Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman, Wheeler, Crick, Lederberg, Delbrück.

The danger today, in this era of big science, is that being exceptionally talented in herding resources becomes the major criterion of success. It means that creativity gets stifled: more senior scientists spend their time herding resources and being administrators, and more junior scientists end up being just cogs on the wheel until they manage to become administrators themselves.

The NIH exacerbated this trend with some of its funding decisions starting in the late 90's. It is now trying to push back (thanks in large part to the leadership of outgoing NIH director Zerhouni) by funding more early-career scientists and so-called investigator-initiated grants.

For those of you not in the business, investigator-initiated grants are critical to the health of any scientific community. These are grants based on proposals come up with by individual scientists, and not by some sort of steering committee. These proposals are the business plans of the scientific community. Imagine that, instead of entrepreneurs going to venture capitalists with a business proposal, you had committees of either government officials or venture capitalists writing most business plans and simply looking for people to carry out those plans. You can imagine that, in most cases, this sort of top-down entrepreneurship wouldn't be as creative or innovative as the bottom-up creativity the business community claims to value.

The same thing is true in science. While some big, top-down projects designed by committees are important (like the Human Genome Project), the lifeblood of science are the ideas generated by creative individuals, working alone or with a small group of colleagues. Creative science based on individual initiative is one of the nicest aspects of the job, and it's important to learn how to do that early in your career. If big science ends up being the way most science is done, a science career will become significantly less interesting and attractive.