Dr. Peter Cotgreave, Director for the Campaign for Science and Engineering expresses his concern about the state of funding in British Science that could have a significant negative impact on creating a sustainable knowledge economy.
Among all the speculation about whether Tony Blair or Gordon Brown has the upper hand in their eternal power struggle, commentators stress how much the two men disagree. But on one issue, Blair and Brown have been in remarkable agreement for the past eight years. Science, they both tell is, is crucial to the ‘knowledge economy’. They want Britain to be ‘the best place in the world for science’. They have put our money where their mouths are; total Government expenditure on research and development has risen in real terms by almost thirty per cent since 1997, and now runs at more than £9 billion each year. So why then do we still need something called the Campaign for Science and Engineering?
As with all Government policies, the headline about science covers a wealth of detail that seems unimportant but which has a huge effect both on the day-to-day lives of the people who are intimately involved, and on wider society and the economy.
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Government expenditure on research and development has risen in real terms by almost thirty per cent since 1997, and now runs at more than £9 billion each year.
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One of the problems today is that an increasing slice of the funding cake is controlled directly by the Government. In 1997, just two per cent of the ‘science budget’ was controlled centrally (the rest was handled by committees of scientific experts), but that figure has risen to more than twenty per cent. In 2003, for the first time ever, the Government produced a central list of 30 questions that researchers must tackle in the coming five years, despite the fact that Governments have a terrible record of predicting what research will be the most interesting or useful. It says much about the hubris of ministers that they claim that British researchers will “solve in the next few years” the question “what is gravitation?” Where Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein finally reached the barrier of their ignorance, scientists in New Labour’s New Britain must triumph.
Moreover, a growing proportion of public funding is only unlocked by when universities raise ‘matching funds’ from industry. An excellent example is the Chancellor’s Science Research Investment Fund (SRIF), which distributes about £500 million of taxpayers’ money each year. A university has to raise a further ten per cent from elsewhere or it is not eligible for its share. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but where are the universities supposed to get £50 million when they are losing many millions of pounds each year from the underfunding of teaching students? The only possible answer is industry, which will quite properly only provide such large sums of cash for laboratories working in fields of interest to their businesses.
With all these strings attached to the funding, the Prime Minister and Chancellor are in great danger of failing to obtain the best value from the very welcome extra investment in science. After decades of crippling poverty, the new investment could potentially allow the scientific community could really forge ahead with important fundamental discoveries. Instead of the handful of Nobel Prizes we have won since 1980, we could return to the days when, on average, Britain produced one scientific Nobel laureate every year. Just as importantly, the knowledge economy would benefit too.
The process by which science feeds into the economy complex. Information and expertise flow in both directions form academics to industrialists, and the money comes from an incomprehensible mixture of public, private and charitable sources.
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Governments have a terrible record of predicting what research will be the most interesting or useful.
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The basic seed corn, without which nothing else is possible, is the fundamental research carried out by scientists and engineers largely in the public sector (mostly in the universities). Their work may seem of little practical value, but without it, most useful technologies would not be possible. This is best illustrated by an example.
In the mid 1970s in Cambridge, Georges Köhler and César Milstein discovered how to create molecules called monoclonal antibodies. Milstein described being ‘attracted to the puzzle’ with a ‘fundamental emphasis’. Nobody believed their work was economically valuable; indeed, Government officials wrote that there was no point in even trying to find a market for the idea. After congratulating Köhler and Milstein on their Nobel Prize, most people forgot about their work.
But as it happens, monoclonal antibodies are now worth billions of pounds a year, and are used to make drugs that treat heart disease, cancer and arthritis. A single drug that prevents blood clotting has worldwide sales that exceed the budget of the Medical Research Council (which funded the original research) and the small company that made it was bought be a multinational corporation in a deal worth £3 billion.
If we want more such breakthroughs to occur in the UK, scientists must regain the power to determine which scientific questions are addressed; they are the only people capable of making the decision properly. Sometimes they will get it wrong, but the money invested in projects that ‘fail’ will not be wasted. Unless scientists take risks, in terms of spending years stumbling along potential blind alleys of knowledge, they stand no chance of coming up with the really big breakthroughs.
Linear, incremental increases in knowledge are valuable, but if we really want a dynamic technological economy of the kind that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown keep promising us, we need the truly exciting leaps forward in knowledge that can only come from unforced, freethinking, blue-sky research that used to be one of Britain’s great strengths.
