Even once you have tenure you are still forced to still play it safe since if you don’t generate the results you don’t get grants and if you don’t bring in the money your university will find ways to get rid of you. Welcome to your new lab - yes we know it was the old broom closet, but you must understand that since you don’t have any grants right now we need to give your lab to research x who has just brought in a $3 million grant.
What is more of a problem is that scientists are being pushed by the system to get their results out as fast as possible so they are not doing the hard work of carefully checking their own work before publication. The incentive is to publish if an experiment works once or twice and hand-wave away the other dozen times it didn’t. Combine that with the enormous pressure PostDocs and PhD students are under to generate results it is amazing anything of value comes out of the lab these days.
As a bit of an aside grant reviews were apparently brought in initially to help scientists avoid working on bad areas. The idea was that everyone would get funded who put up a reasonable grant and they just wanted to help screen out the bad ideas so people didn’t waste their time.
We have since twisted this into the current system where we try to determine which of the top few percent of grants are the best. Of course the whole ranking process is so noisy that it is little better than chance for anyone in the top 25%.
A much better system would be to rank the grants as worth funding or not and then put all those worth funding into a lottery to choose who gets funded. At least this way even the losers would know they were on the right track and they were just unlucky. It would save an enormous amount of grantmanship and other activities that are the antithesis of everything science should be about.