Daily View: Science funding cuts
Anticipating the spending review, commentators turn their eyes to the £6bn science budget. The Business Secretary Vince Cable announced his department will stop funding "mediocre" research.
Former chief executive of the British Medical Research Council Prof. that by definition some research will be mediocre:
"Some of it doesn't produce the results that we're expecting. That is the nature of research. One of the definitions of an experiment is a procedure of which the outcome cannot be known in advance."
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The [subscription required] that if Vince Cable wants to get rid of mediocre research he should start with the mistakes in his own statistics:
"The suggestion that 45 per cent of funding rewards science that is 'not of excellent standard' was drawn from a basic misreading of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which judges the quality of university research and its eligibility for support. In the last RAE, 55 per cent of academics in England received a three or four-star rating, meaning 'internationally excellent' or 'world-leading'. This has been reversed to estimate how much is not up to scratch."
After dissecting Vince Cable's speech, the cuts aren't that bad:
"It turns out that all the gloomy stuff in advance about not funding 'mediocre' research probably only adds up to £115m of cuts. If the research base gets away with that, scientists will be dancing in the streets. Though the new universities that Cable's now inviting to 'concentrate on teaching' will probably feel differently."
Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Cardiff University, that Vince Cable is wrong to push funding towards "commercially useful" science:
"For what it's worth I'll repeat my own view that "commercially useful" research should not be funded by the taxpayer through research grants. If it's going to pay off in the short term it should be funded by private investors or venture capitalists of some sort. Dragon's Den, even. When the public purse is so heavily constrained, it should only be asked to fund those things that can't in practice be funded any other way. That means long-term, speculative, curiosity driven research. You know, science."
that Vince Cable's own son works in the well-funded Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. Mr Brooks asks why British science isn't as well funded:
"Well, it helps that, when these schemes were set up, the prime minister of Singapore had a first class honours degree in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. The deputy prime minister, Tony Tan, had a PhD in physics and had worked in physics and mathematics departments for many years.
"I visited Singapore in the summer, and researchers there told me that, when Tan visited research labs, he talked 'like he's one of us.' He knew the value of what scientists do, and what they need to get it done. Until the UK has more trained scientists in government, research funding at Singaporean levels will remain a distant dream."
politicians' approach of cutting the science budget, seeing it as predictable and lacking an understanding in science:
"Minister: Oh well, we clearly should only fund excellence. It is inexcusable surely that we are funding anything that is below average?
US2: Quite right minister. We should only fund the top half I would say. We should monitor it annually and if any of it is below the top half we should cut it.
US1: Also, some research comes up with negative results. We shouldn't fund that stuff.
Minister: Excellent, excellent. Well, that's a start. But I don't want to salami slice.
US2: Indeed minister. We prefer to use this axe ...
(To be repeated once every five years or so until the lights go out.)"
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