The Howard Hughes Institute just handed out $10 million to a select group of 56 biomed researchers. Each.
Focus is on risky long term research on large scale health and public health issues.
These are junior and early mid-career researchers, with 4-10 year experience as faculty. Appointment is for 5 years initially, so the mean funding level is just over $2 million per year per investigator.
Should help the tenure case for the junior end of the range... awardees were chosen from a list of about 1000 applicants.
The affiliation of the researchers seems worryingly concentrated in about 3-4 major universities, with a scatter of other places. Would expect people at those places to be disproportionately successful, but maybe not quite so over-represented, but that is just eyeballing the list.
I wish someone had the pockets to do a program like that for the physical sciences...