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Title: Utilitarian funding rules will stifle science, says Sir Mark Walport Publication: The Times Online |
Author: Mark Henderson Country: United Kingdom |
Published Date: February 24, 2010 |
New science funding rules that prioritise studies with anticipated economic or social benefits are misconceived and risk stifling discovery and understanding, according to the head of Britain’s biggest independent supporter of research.
Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, told The Times that the Government’s “impact agenda”, which requires researchers to predict the value of their work when applying for grants, will undermine the academic freedom that best delivers scientific progress.
The initiative will place needless constraints on research while asking scientists to make impossible predictions about what their experiments will reveal, he said. The Wellcome Trust, which as Britain’s biggest biomedical research charity awards more than £600 million in grants every year, is taking the opposite approach to funding, by backing talented scientists and then allowing them to pursue the questions they think most important.
Sir Mark is the latest senior scientist to attack the “impact plans”, which research councils now use to help determine which researchers are given government grants. Other critics include Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and President of the Royal Society, and Nobel laureates such as Sir Tim Hunt, Sir Harry Kroto, and Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, who won last year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Sir Mark’s intervention is particularly significant because the Wellcome Trust is the second largest supporter of British science after the Government, and often co-operates with research councils to make awards.
In an interview with The Times to mark the launch this week of the Trust’s new strategic plan for the next ten years, he said it was foolish to expect academics to predict the outcome or influence of their work before it has started.
“You cannot predict where the impact of your research is going to be, you just can't do it,” he said. “Even when you ask people what the impact of past research has been, it is difficult: even the very best researchers in the world are likely to have only one or two major impacts in their careers, and it often takes a long time to become clear what these are.
“You might be able to judge impact at an institutional level, but to try to ask individuals what their work’s impact might be is very difficult. To be honest, it just doesn’t make sense.”
Most important scientific advances, Sir Mark said, cannot possibly be predicted in advance. “When people who have made enormously exciting discoveries, it's normally because something unexpected has happened when they were doing their experiments. And rather than rejecting that because it didn't fit with their preconceived ideas, they've said gosh, isn't that interesting and surprising, and followed it up. You need to give researchers the freedom to explore the unexpected.”
The Wellcome Trust’s new funding arrangements will reflect that, by identifying talented researchers and teams who are investigating important questions, and then giving them considerable leeway to pursue research as they see fit. It will give successful applicants long-term financial support, usually for seven years at a time. Almost all grants will involve an interview, which is rare for research grants.
“I think there's a tremendous danger in being overprescriptive when grants are given in terms of what people are going to do,” Sir Mark said. “We've always recognised that what you say you're going to do and what you actually do are two different things. Science is about answering important questions. The strength of a good scientist is they know what a good question is, they know when a question is in principle tractable, and then they attack the question from many different angles.”
He said that while scientists who receive public or charity funding need to be accountable, there are better ways of achieving this than impact assessments. “There has to be an argument to the treasury and the taxpayer that we ought to fund research, but I think that's much more about finding a better way of explaining the results of research than trying to constrain the scientists to deliver things that will be of benefit to the taxpayer. I think you can't look for economic returns on anything other than a very long term basis.”
The Wellcome Trust has identified five areas for particular emphasis over the next decade in its strategic plan. These are harnessing the health benefits of genetics, understanding the brain, combating infectious disease, investigating development, ageing and chronic disease, and investigating links between the environment, nutrition and health.