US biomedical scientists rarely earn their first major grants during their optimum innovative years, concludes a study (K. R. W. Matthews et al. PLoS ONE 6, e29738; 2011). In 2008, the average age of a scientist getting a first grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) was 42, the authors found. But researchers who won Nobel prizes in medicine or chemistry between 1980 and 2010 did their pioneering work at an average of 41 years; 78% did so before 51, the average age of NIH investigators now. Part of the problem is that the NIH is risk-averse and unwilling to fund nascent work, argues Kirstin Matthews, lead author of the study and a science and technology policy fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas.