\Support for blue skies research has varied over time, ultimately becoming subject to the political

process, in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom,[4] and India. Vannevar
Bush's 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier, made the argument for the value of basic
research in the postwar era, and was the basis for many appeals to the federal funding of basic
research.[5] The 1957 launch of Sputnik prompted the United States Air Force Office of Scientific
Research to sponsor blue skies research into the 1960s.[6] By the 1970s, financial strains brought
pressure on public expenditure on the sciences, first in the UK and the Netherlands, and by the
1990s in Germany and the United States.[5]
In 1980, British Petroleum (known as BP after 2000) established a blue skies research initiative
called the Venture Research Unit, headed by particle physicist Donald Braben. Braben
controversially challenged peer review as the mechanism for establishing funding, emphasizing
the selection of researchers whose proposals "could radically change the way we think about
something important."[7]
In 2005, Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust and former Professor of Medicine at
Imperial College, London warned that excessive emphasis on agenda-driven research could
jeopardise serendipitous advances in science: