Have your say! testimony wanted
Branwen Hide
Wednesday, 08 April 2009 11:17 UTC
MPs are currently looking for researchers views on the Governments plans to align science funding with the UK’s economic strenght (see the article in last weeks THE).
The deadline for reseponses is due April 20th, 2009.
More information is avaliable on the Innovation, Science and Skills Selecto Committee website.
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Replies
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While knowledge transfer is a good thing, and exploitation of UK research should be an expectation, this sort of initiative runs the severe risk that research will be canalised to our detriment over the medium and long term. I’ve talked to the odd RC person and been assured that blue sky stuff will still be possible, but one has to wonder.
That said, an area where this could be spun for the public and corporate good is bioscience data collection and management. The UK is good at industrial bioscience (#1), and there are a lot of potentially relevant data generated in the public domain (i.e., with public money), that are neither collected nor managed efficiently (#2).
So putting those two facts together, one might conclude that supporting the development of free, friendly software to support scientists, and paying (shockingly) for the army of curators we so desperately need to ensure that the data collected are checked for quality, and tagged so as to be amenable to discovery, would go a long way to speed advances in the biosciences.
Pharma and food could benefit greatly, and the fundamental science would advance and diversify more quickly, so all would win. Some RCs do see this and have acted, in a limited way (pilot schemes, etc.), but we need lots of cash for salaries that just isn’t there. A huge problem is that such things (software, databases, curators) are (with the exception of a couple of small schemes) forced to seek funds from schemes designed to support research, when really they are about infrastructure provision. The foundations of a building are not the same as the edifice they support, and should not be judged by the same set of criteria.
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The research councils have identified three new funding priorities as part of their ‘vision of the future’.
The areas are:
1. developing better ‘connected communities’
2. safe guarding the UK’s food chain
3. ensuring the nation’s economic resilienceFor more information see the articles Research councils unveil ’future vision, ’ in last weeks THE.
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God help us. Seems that this might be some sort of ring-fenced money though?
I like the NERC statement: “Our focus is very much on our … priority programmes and the … new areas.” (Has the ring of ‘Yes, dear’ about it.)
What’s not really clear from the article is the impact of this on existing research funds, and by extension on the scoring of applications. If it were new money, then great, go for it. If it is the same money then there’s a real issue unless it is an insignificant amount. And where do they imagine the new labour (small letters) will come from to ramp up efforts in their chosen areas — should career scientists suddenly change tack on a political whim? To retrain takes years, by which time probably we’ll have exciting new goals.
UK science rocks, leave us alone.
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I don’t know why these things have to be so dysfunctionally goal-driven (well that’s a lie — it’s politicians’ penchant for buzzy digestible solutions to non-problems, as ever, but anyway).
What about working out how to make science work better period? I moan on (and on) on here I know (though I seem to be reassuringly ignorable), but when you read things like Doug Kell’s most recent blog (and yes, he’s as much a theoretician as experimentalist by background, but nonetheless) about deep stuctural issues in biological science, you have to wonder whether the people at DIUS and higher will ever get a grip on how things really work, and therefore how to make them work better.
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