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Research Fortnightly Article May 2010

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Research Fortnightly Article May 2010 Updated daily at www.ResearchResearch.com Founded by William Cullerne Bown 19 May 2010 German science academy says it is world’s oldest - p16 Cadbury takeover Bournville to get chocolate research excellence centre - p6 Astronomy Fears rise of further cuts - p5 Researchers prepare for Osborne’s axe Science budget could be cut by £60 million on Monday CIENCE AND UNIVERSITY LOBBYISTS are working overtime S by Colin Macilwain and Laura Hood this week in an attempt to protect their budgets from the coming cuts, which the government says it will much of that R&D, like most RDA spending, is awarded announce on 24 May. by other parts of the government and would not nec- Chancellor George Osborne confirmed on 17 May essarily stop if the RDAs were abolished. that the first £6 billion in public spending cuts will Capital expenditure is also facing cutbacks, be announced on Monday in advance of the full including landmark projects such as the UK Centre ‘emergency budget’ that the government will intro- for Medical Research and Innovation in central duce on 22 June. London—a £600m project backed by the Medical His words have left researchers wondering where Research Council, University College London, Cancer the axe will fall. Research UK and the Wellcome Trust. Labour had This first round of cuts is in line with a pre-election promised to invest £250m in this project. pledge from the Conservative Party, which the Liberal Pharmaceutical industry leaders, meanwhile, are Democrats also agreed to as part of the coalition anxious about the fate of the patent box scheme, a agreement with the Tories. The £6bn pledge, how- pet project of former science minister Paul Drayson, ever, accounts for only 1 per cent of public spending, announced in this year’s budget. The scheme offers against the 10 per cent or so that experts say will be tax breaks to companies that file patents in the UK. needed, in combination with tax increases, to balance GlaxoSmithKline immediately pledged to invest an the budget. extra £500m in the UK as a direct result. David Willetts, incoming Conservative minister of “The concern is that it’s kept,” a spokesman for the state for universities and science, has already been in Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry touch with science groups. He has indicated to them told Research Fortnight. “We do think that it was a that he will ‘do his best’ to protect the science budg- useful idea and one that would help stimulate what is et. “There’s scope for a good outcome,” says Hilary a very innovative industry and so we would want it to Leevers, acting director of the Campaign for Science remain in there and very much hope that it isn’t some- and Engineering. thing they would be looking at [to cut].” However, over the weekend Willetts also said that The Technology Strategy Board, meanwhile, may Labour had left behind “not so much an in-tray as a have to drop plans to support a series of technol- minefield”. ogy and innovation centres based on Germany’s If the £6bn science budget—which includes the Fraunhofer centres. Former business secretary Peter research councils and money to support research Mandelson threw his weight behind the projects in from the higher education funding councils—was cut March following a report by technology entrepreneur back on a pro-rata basis, it would lose £60 million on Hermann Hauser. He agreed that two or three centres Monday. The science lobby hopes the figure will be would be supported with funding of between £5m and lower, but fears that it will be higher. Two research- £10m per year each. intensive areas that have been ring-fenced, however, The Conservatives, on the other Every new opportunity are healthcare and international development. hand, have been planning to base for research funding A whole set of cherished Labour projects are now much of their own innovation from every sponsor in in Osborne’s firing line. These include the regional policy around an entirely differ- the UK, EU, US & beyond development agencies, which the Conservatives have ent review—that conducted by the Every discipline long wanted to close. The RDAs were due to spend inventor and vacuum cleaner entre- Every fortnight £1.9bn this year, about £300m of it on R&D. However, preneur, James Dyson. Issue No. 346 2 editorial Research Fortnight, 19 May 2010 Edited by Ehsan Masood [email protected] Tel: 020 7216 6500 Fax: 020 7216 6501 Unit 111, 134-146 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AR e l s e w h e r e “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a huge Selective surgery shake-up in Iter management under him.” A fusion scientist expects big changes at The funding councils and research councils are unlikely to be immune the Iter fusion research project if Osamu from the spending cuts to be announced next week, or the emergency Motojima replaces Kaname Ikeda as director general. Nature, 12/5/10. budget of 22 June. Labour didn’t exempt them from its so-called ‘efficien- cy savings’ and there is no reason to suppose that the new coalition will “The price of the research was multiplied do so. At the Higher Education Funding Council for England, for example, by maybe a factor of 5 for anthrax and maybe a factor of 2 for Ebola.” ministerial commitments to keep cash flowing to the universities have Elizabeth Casman, associate professor of already forced a small bureaucracy to take the axe to itself. engineering and public policy at Carnegie Loathe as the universities may be to admit it, this is not a sensible way Mellon University, says US government rules intended to protect and encourage research of administering public funds. The research councils and funding coun- involving pathogens that could be used as cils are small institutions for the amount of money that they distribute. biological weapons have made that research If they fall victim to a headline-grabbing ‘quango squeeze’ they will be much less efficient. The Scientist, 10/5/10. unable to do their job of keeping a firm eye on spending. “Vince Cable in the business department— These councils also perform important national functions. JISC (for- that’s an extremely important department merly the Joint Information Systems Committee), for example, is directly in delivering structural reform to the British economy.” supported by the funding councils to help ensure that university students Chancellor George Osborne says business and staff get advanced information and communications technology. This secretary Vince Cable will take the lead on sort of service is utterly fundamental to the higher education system, but rebalancing the UK economy during the eco- nomic recovery. Financial Times, 17/5/10. investment in it is already being mercilessly squeezed. We need to change direction. “Our synthesis provides overwhelming The current approach to cutting chimes with the lobbying of univer- evidence that governments have failed to deliver on the commitments they made sities since the financial squeeze came into view, which has aimed to and the target has not been met.” protect the unit of resource they receive for teaching each student. This Stuart Butchart, lead author of a UN report on funding is the largest component of the funding councils’ spending and is biodiversity, says life on Earth is being extin- guished as fast as ever despite a commitment probably the most important to those mismanaged universities that now from world leaders that this year would see a face a financial crisis. Hence the current policy is one that avoids difficult slowing in the rate of destruction. The Times, choices, which perhaps was inevitable with an election looming. 30/4/10. We must now be bolder. We must prioritise what really matters, even if “We have seen the rise of the scientist- this does not maximise the core block grant that goes to each university. communicators. Now is the time to shift Let’s make sure, for example, that we provide state-of-the-art ICT for our the focus and rear a generation of scien- tist-politicians—before it is too late.” universities. If that makes life tougher for some universities, so be it. Michael Brooks, who ran as a Science Party Over at the research councils, an analogous dynamic exists but on a candidate in the election, wants the Royal larger scale. On the one hand there are grants for individual university Society to fund career breaks for scientists to give them an opportunity to gain experi- researchers. These sit alongside the more sophisticated, interdisciplinary ence of politics. New Scientist S Word blog, mechanisms, such as the Living with Environmental Change programme 12/5/10. led by the Natural Environment Research Council. Conservatives are, by tradition and temperament, inclined towards the former. But since the last Conservative government, research has become d e c a d e more collaborative in nature. The most essential, most paradigm-chang- ing, and even some of the most-cited research is done, these days, across “European Southern disciplinary boundaries, allying computer science with biology, physics Observatory membership with atmospheric chemistry, law with sociology. would only be viable if The result is that many of the research councils’ interdisciplinary pro- grammes are more relevant to both science and innovation than the old substantial new funding is mainstay of single-discipline grants. Any Tory impulse to preserve the available.” latter at the expense of the former will undermine excellence. The Particle Physics and Astronomy Nobody ever said that freezing or cutting research funding would be Research Council’s astronomy panel says easy. The balance of funding between different disciplines is essentially the cost of the UK joining the ESO is a major concern.
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