Delft: Europe’s flagship science funder has handed its most senior prize to more than three hundred established researchers, betting close to 840 million euros on the kind of long-shot inquiry that rarely finds backing elsewhere.

The European Research Council confirmed that its latest round of Advanced Grants will support 319 leading scientists with roughly 838 million euros drawn from the Horizon Europe budget. The awards go to investigators with a proven record who propose ambitious, high-risk projects.

Each grant runs up to five years and can reach 2.5 million euros, money that pays for teams, equipment and the freedom to chase a question without a guaranteed payoff. The council prizes exactly that latitude, arguing that the biggest breakthroughs seldom follow a tidy plan.

The funding spans the full sweep of disciplines, from physics and the life sciences to the humanities and social research. Selection rests on a single test, the scientific excellence of the proposal and the applicant, rather than on political priorities or promised commercial returns.

Beyond the senior tier, the council’s wider programme carries a budget of about 2.7 billion euros for the year, feeding a ladder of schemes that runs from grants for early-career researchers to proof-of-concept awards that help laboratory findings edge toward the market.

Appetite for the money keeps growing. The most recent call aimed at researchers still building their independence drew 4,807 applications, a rise of more than a fifth on the previous year, a surge that both flatters the scheme’s reputation and squeezes its success rate.

That crush of demand feeds a familiar worry about brain drain. Council officials and university leaders have long argued that stable, generous funding is what keeps talented scientists on the continent rather than drifting to better-resourced laboratories abroad, and the oversubscription underlines how many strong ideas go unfunded.

The awards also land amid a broader debate over how much Europe spends on research at all. Successive reports have warned that the bloc trails the United States and China on private and public science investment alike, and that its next multiannual budget must lift ambition if it hopes to close the gap.

For the winners, the immediate effect is straightforward: several years of secure funding to pursue work that might otherwise never begin. For the council, each cohort is a wager that curiosity-driven science, freed from short-term pressure, will repay the investment in discoveries no one can yet name.