"Free From Limiting Factors" - 10,000 new Laboratories

The establishment of 10,000 new, non-expert-led laboratories in the next ten years is among the ambitious targets that will be discussed by the Welcome Trust. 

It also envisages the doubling of the number of children doing brain surgery by 2030.

The initiative has been christened "Brilliant" by Prof Branestawm, of the Institute of Dodgy inventions and Groupthink.

Professor Branestawm explained how Brilliant would result in a million new scientists, operating from someone's front room.

 "Labs led by people who fancy having a go release science from key limiting factors. When you don't need a proper lab, to pay the scientists, and long, costly education for nuclear physicists, then we can release untrained people to just crack on and do stuff with whatever kit they can knock up. In lab-planting, there are no safety standards. I mean, passengers."

 Prof Branestawm has been testing this theory by talking to other scientists. There is some work to be done, he admitted, in ensuring nobody actually created dark matter and destroyed Croydon.

Many of the 10,000 labs would start small, and some would remain as 20 or 30 self-taught scientists working from someone's front room. Prof Branestawm broke off to appeal for people with enormous front rooms to come forward. But he said the definition of laboratory was "tight". There must be at least one drunk bloke who everyone works round, and a spare lab coat and safety glasses in case Boris Johnson pops round.

As a mushroom cloud formed over Chipping Pagwell behind him, Prof Branestawm said, "we must avoid this initiative being seen as 'just another initiative '. Which is why we're calling it a 'vision ', which is entirely different. Not the same thing at all. The important thing about this vision is that, when we've stripped talented people out of existing labs to found new labs in people's sheds with no equipment, it's not my fault that the existing labs fail because they've lost key staff, and the new ones explode because Mrs Jones managed to split the atom in the Hoover. No, it's your fault because you didn't believe enough."

Possibly based on an article in the Church Times about the Church of England starting 10,000 new churches in ten years.