Lean science

"Lean science is built upon the concept that all scientific achievements sprang up in the minds of individual people. Thus, providing individual scientists with a hospitable environment in which they can flourish and excel is bound to lead to new discoveries. (...)
In the past, great thinkers and artists appear to have come in groups. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were not only contemporaries, they also lived in the same city—Athens in Greece. The coincidence of great thinkers continued in history—artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were contemporaries just like painters such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet and Paul Cezanne or poets like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich von Kleist.
How come there was such an abundance of great thinkers in certain places at certain times, while there seems to be little if any of such excellence around today? I, for one, am utterly convinced that such great minds are indeed around today—they always have been—but those periods in Greece, France and Germany were rare times when the environmental conditions were right for great thinkers to emerge and become visible, speak up and meet each other, exchange ideas and then take them further.
Thus, in my opinion, the first thing to consider when thinking about pressing scientific issues would be to provide the right environmental conditions for scientists to flourish in. That does not mean loads of money. On the contrary, it means respect, freedom of thought, a platform for the exchange of ideas, and a path forward even for the non conformist—since by definition, all great thinkers were non-conformists. "
Eberhard Zangger, Geoarchaeologist