British Government Slashes Scientific Research 168
asobala writes "The British Government has slashed the funding of scientific Research Councils by £68 million. The Research Councils most affected by this include the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which has been hit by a £29 million reduction in funding, and the Medical Research Council, which is seeing a £10.7 million reduction in funding. The response of the BBSRC biological research council announces that the council will have to cut 20 new grants and reduce expenditure on new equipment."
Parallels in the US Situation (Score:5, Informative)
Concerned citizens are encouraged to write to their congressmen [congressweb.com] to not forget the cause of advancement in the US. Instead of bemoaning the loss of the US edge in the sciences [slashdot.org], speak up!
It seems hardly a coincidence that the US and UK are allies in the misguided Iraqi Invasion, as well as the fight against adequate science and research funding. With all the money diverted into these misguided efforts, no wonder science funding is suffering all over (There's only so much of it to go around!)
* Example from the nytimes.com article:
"Among the projects at risk is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, on Long Island. The $600 million machine -- 2.4 miles in circumference -- slams together subatomic particles to recreate conditions at the beginning of time, some 14 billion years ago, so scientists can study the Big Bang theory. It was already operating partly on charitable contributions, officials say, and now could shut down entirely, throwing its 1,069 specialists into limbo."
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>is the UK also seeing a surge in Jeebus-people who are anti-science
Yes.
>similar to what we're seeing in the US?
Absolutely not!
IMHO
US rarely needed government investment (Score:1, Troll)
Most US advances are not made with government money. It just doesn't work that way. Look towards the corporations leading the edges of technology to see what is really getting done that applicable to everyday life.
The problem with government grants is that you end up with both good and bad, new ways to heal people and usually multiple ways to kill them. At least pharms are a one way street in the corporate world... still...
don't bemoan a proble
Re:US rarely needed government investment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:US rarely needed government investment (Score:5, Funny)
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GORE 2008!
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Re:US rarely needed government investment (Score:4, Informative)
Re:US rarely needed government investment (Score:4, Insightful)
Get that? to make things applicable to daily life... that is, to develop technology... you need to research science, which is not immediately or directly applicable to daily life typically.
Funny how that works, I think. You'd almost think it was worth funding science research.
Re:US rarely needed government investment (Score:5, Insightful)
Most government investments into fundamental physics, biology, astronomy, computer science, applied math, and many other types of research would never occur, and corresponding research never made, in any private context, because private corporations can find absolutely no incentive for it (save for exceptions like IBM and Bell Labs, which are still very limited in scope and dwarfed by the US scientific establishment). Moreover, the long-term consequences of this research and the experience acquired by people who perform it are unpredictable and would be precluded in a private context, where results are not nearly as widely published and shared across the community.
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Recall quantum theory? You might also recall it being associated with computer chips. Try ge
Re:US rarely needed government investment (Score:5, Insightful)
Open up any science journal of your choice. In the acknowledgements section of each article the funding that supported the study will be stated. If you found a journal where even just 10% of the articles were supported in part or in full by non-governmental funds, I wouldn't believe you until I had that journal in my hands to verify it.
Government funding of research is only half of the story. When I am funded by the government, I am expected to publish my findings so that other researchers may learn from them. Contrast that to industrial researchers, who often if they find something of interest it becomes a trade secret. Sure that company the corporate scientist works for might use that knowledge to generate a better, cleaner, faster, whatever product which ain't a bad thing at all...but they might just stuff it in a report in their knowledge base and sit on it forever. Either way, nobody outside the corporation knows exactly how they do that voodoo they do so well, and those corporate scientists will be basing a large part of their background knowledge for their study on publicly funded research. Goverments cut public funding of science at their own peril.
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Netscape browser, born as Mosaic, made by University students at a government funded, land grant institution.
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But plenty of money for Big Brother (Score:1, Insightful)
Take away the toys, funding, research, the education. No more good jobs, no more anything interesting. More investment in off-shoring, and for the homeland more police and surveillance... Don't know what to do, don't care what you do, don't care if you're fed, or have a roof over your head. Just gonna beat you over the head and fill you with dread, until you are dead.
My keyword is blabbing... How appropriate
Parallels in the US Situation /Broken NYTimes Link (Score:1)
NSF, NIH funding increased?! (Score:2)
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Re:Wow, valuable experiment! (Score:5, Insightful)
You have no idea what this research will lead to directly, or indirectly via supporting technologies. If funding bodies were as short sighted as you, you wouldn't be here now since the web wouldn't exist. It was developed as a supporting technology at a particle accelerator (CERN).
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And with earthlings as stupid as we seem to be, it might be necessary for our species to master spaceflight in the future, lest we cause our own extinctio.
Stew
Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
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If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Here's a breakdown:
14 million pounds to replace the carpeting in the surveillance centre (includes the standard 98% kickback for my nephew who runs the carpet company).
38 million pounds to refund to the party's corporate sponsors as tax breaks. After all, they do deserve it for all the hard work they've done in supporting us.
5 million pounds to cover miscellaneous expenses
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Read this also (Score:5, Informative)
And please pay close attention to the 3.4bn value halfway down. This is not a "slash" in the budget, its simply the government calling back some of the buffer money thats left at the end of the year. It will have an effect, and some people may be out of funding as a result, but lets not blow it totally out of proportion. With luck some of that money that was previously "wasted" in Rover might make it into future science budgets...
Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't get past the first sentence of the summary without having these big questions pop into your head. At least if you have any critical thinking ability whatsoever.
Problem with accounting in Govt (Score:2)
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This sounds similar to how in the US when politician A proposes to increase some kind of funding for program X only to have politician B propose a smaller increase for the same program. Politician A then holds press conferences to complain about how terrible politician B is for "Cutting" and "Slashing" funding
A Few Facts (Score:4, Informative)
As for the story - it is due to the DTI having to pay extra costs as a result of the UK car manufacturer Rover going bust. It is not some vast cutback, and the
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6384499.stm [bbc.co.uk]
BBC story give a far more sensible view that the summary does. It is a 1 year cut due to an overspend, and will be restored (with an increase on top of it) next year. I am no fan of the current Labour government and their lying ways - but they are sensible enough to realise that increasing funding in science and turning the UK into a "knowledge based" economy is not only one way for the future - it is the *only* way.
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It's not even remotely fair to compare a BBC new story with a Slashdot summary, I know that and I'm American. Now if you were comparing Slashdot to, say, Fox News
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Given how often Slashdot quotes from The Register, that should be expected
Does the rest of the world understand that reference?
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Ditto. And a quick google finds the 2005/6 total budget was £2.8 billion [rcuk.ac.uk], so 68 million is about 2.5% (assuming billion=1000 million). *Perhaps* significant (especially to those who will loose a grant), but certainly not "slashed". But, hey, this is Slashdot
New missiles cost a lot you know... (Score:2)
The money's got to come from somewhere!
Fundamentaists? (Score:2)
In any case, looks more like budget tweaking compared to the overall budget then a mass cutback.
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Well, the UK has it's extremists, apathists, irrationalists and plenty other '*ists' like anywhere else. But in this particular case there's nothing ominous at all - money got spent in the wrong place trying to bail out an old UK company and this is where that money has come from.
It's a fraction of the total amount earmarked for various sciences and it's a one-off reduction - it'll be back on budget next year.
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Biting the hand that feeds you... (Score:1)
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This isn't rocket science. It's the difference between our lifestyles. If you want food shipped from all over the world, world class healthcare, enormous amounts of pointless travel and lots of high-end consumer luxuries, you have to pay for it. Companies know that if they employ people in western nations, then THEY are going to have to pay for
specific cuts or proportional to the funding? (Score:1)
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Obvious (Score:2, Troll)
There are plenty of other socially-responsible programs that need funding as well.
You can only cut the pie so thin, and then somebody doesn't get a slice at all. NHS or science? People or theories? This is precisely the discussion going on in the US and so far the "theories" side is still winning by enough of a
Re: Mods, Context please. (Score:2)
I fail to see how this is at all a troll OR a flamebait. Obviously, scientific investment is necessary for ANY nation that doesnt want to be left behind in the increasingly "near" futures, but how DO you propose balancing the need for theoretical advancement versus direct advancement of your populace by investing more in health care programs and
Ministry Funding (Score:5, Funny)
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Gotta pay for those cams (Score:2)
Look like the Brits (Score:1)
Results (Score:1)
As religion gets bigger, science gets smaller. I guess the reverse is also true, but that's just not the trend these days is it? With science you justify your existence by getting results. Sooner or later it's no results, no money.
With religion, results are not required - and your f
Troll (Score:2)
Eurofighters (Score:4, Funny)
They could avoid this (Score:2)
What a mess... (Score:3, Insightful)
scientifically (Score:1)
The community does need to ask--why is science getting "more expensive"? Is it the cost of an apparatus? The IP law/legal know-how to protect yourself, that science is currently profit oriented, science is tightly coupled with a free market society or even tightly coupled to a political bias? Or is it just a cos
Fraction (Score:2)
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google [google.co.uk] is your friend!
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Re:The squiggle currency... (Score:5, Informative)
FYI. 'Pound' is short for 'pound sterling' (the official name for the currency), which in turn is short for 'pound of sterling silver', which originally determined the currency's value. The 'squiggly' is based on the letter L, which naturally is derived from the word 'librum'.
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Almost correct, it is derived from the Latin libra, which trivially means "pound" (or also "scales"). It is also the same stem for the Lira (Italian and Turkish), which explains why the complete name of the Pound Sterling in Italian is Lira Sterlina, whereas the word for pound as a measure of weight is libbra (occurs mostly in old Hollywood movies, before they started translating to SI; most people have not the sligh
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That's simple. An ounce [aol.com] weighs many times more than a pound [nottinghil...ing.org.uk]. HTH!
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The money is being redirected (according to BBC and el reg) to continue payouts on the Rover bailout which was done for the sole reason of Tony Bliar collecting himself some votes in the last electio
Re:It isn't a bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a question I don't quite know how I'd answer, and I'm interested in your take on it: if you're doing something in the "pure" science realm, which has NO practical / applied value to anybody, except scratching a scientists' itch to "know" something... does that really justify government funding? The government is funding science by taking money from its citizens (through ta
Re:It isn't a bad thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It isn't a bad thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Pure science has been held up as a beacon of hope, as a way to allow scientists to pursue their own intuitions, and thus to find totally new solutions to old problems. This is seen in contrast to applied science, where short-term goals do not allow sufficient room for finding really new approaches. Indeed, the irony here is that the best applications of sciences are ultimately based on pure, rather than applied research.
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For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory [wikipedia.org] was purely theoretical and by your definition useless for many years. However we now find that it has rather useful applications in biochemistry.
Part of the role of government should be to expand human knowledge in directions that the free market will not. We are generally willing to accept this cost as some of this r
Re:It isn't a bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Applied science is a guy realizing that if he does it just so then the ions can push a spaceship.
Without the discovery of ways to generate high velocity ions, the second guy wouldn't have invented an ion engine.
I suspect that in the long run, pure science will get done, most likely after a lull of 20-30 years when companies have "run out" of things to invent from the current crop of discoveries. Someone will end up trying something totally new and just swallow the risk of an expensive failure, but I doubt it will be anything along the lines of building multi-billion dollar particle accelerators just to find out if there are any other dimensions (who knows, maybe there are, and maybe they could even be made useful, but the expense of finding them and the risk of finding out that they aren't there or that they're not useful... it'd be almost impossible to justify the cost).
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Getting rid of Government grants would require
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How about a royalty model? (Score:2)
I wonder if somebody has thought about a system where royalties on this kind of pure science (from the applied sciences) could be paid back into a pool, funding further science. It would change the current model, but if anything it would accelerate the amount of science done and not leave it beholden to Congress every year.
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Re:It isn't a bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be because you're an ideological fucktard who values a 'political belief system' more than the vast social and economic gains humanity has seen through government sponsored pure research. Government funded research paid to develop the very tool you're using to post endless (usually offtopic) screeds about 'anacrocapitcalism.' Not that you'll see the irony.
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Anyway, as your ignorance is so clearly entrenched, i shan't bother to debunk the idea that not-for-profit scientific research has no relationship to the success of a c
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There is a lot of very useful science that can't be funded by private organizations because they aren't profitable YET. Carbon nanotubes, quantum computers, fusion powerplants. Would you like their research to stop?
There is a lot of useless research out there too,
Re:It isn't a bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you considered that this may reflect increased competition caused by ever-shrinking budgets?
"let the market produce what the market has a demand for, not for pie-in-the-sky results"
Government funds science that has no obvious application precisely because the free market would not. The government understands that expanding human knowledge is in the public interest, whereas you do not. Well, it used to, anyway... thanks to people like you, pure research is increasingly seen as less worthy of funding than, say, attacking sovereign nations without cause. Thanks.
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You clearly have no idea what the Research Councils do. One of the big things the Medical Research Council does is explore new ways to use out-of-patent drugs. The way the patent incentive system works, there's no way the market would explore, for example, us
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No rational marketeer would invest in pure research, ever, for any reason. Because by definition, you can't even forsee whether it's useful or not, whether it will EVER turn into a practical application or not. Sure, sometimes it's wildly successful, but it is a very expensive, time consuming, risky proposition if you require a profit payoff to pursue it. There is no way to even tell if the product that may ever come of it wi
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Obviously most companies couldn't actually invest in more than one those fields, but
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So sorry but, the market says no.
pure science benefits commerce (Score:4, Informative)
Sir, first things first: I frequently disagree with your positions as posted here, but I'm glad you keep coming back to stir up a good discussion.
It's a common perception amongst people with, how to put it, a bottom-line focus or business perspective to question the value of funding for things like the pure sciences. It's not even a particularly, within that limited frame of reference, a bad position to take. However, I think that examples can easily be found that point to the value of funding even highly speculative scientific endeavors, that even though the pay-off time-frames are immense thus making ROI calculations almost a crap shoot ... every now and then one pays off so hugely that it changes the entire world (and in the process, opens up vast new fields of business opportunity, which the original investing entity might even benefit from if they're sufficiently quick on their feet). The prime example that comes to mind is James Clerk Maxwell and his funding on behalf of the British government. Without Maxwell's fundamental work on electromagnetism whole swaths of industries as we know them today would not exist (or wouldn't exist in their well-characterized form). A few pounds sterling 150 years ago, and now the British (and the rest of us) get to apply that work product of pure science (at that time, almost pure science fiction) for incalculable gains here in the commercial world. Putting it another way, I seem to recall you had a sporting goods/skating store at one point (currently?). Do you think you'd have (would have had?) that business had not some crazy Germans and Russians in the mid-1800s fooled around in their state-funded university labs with this new-fangled "organic chemistry" stuff (polyurethane and all the other wonders of petroproduct/elastomer/plastic chemistry and chemical engineering)? Would the colorful dyes in all those materials be possible and indeed easily produced had Kekulé not fallen into a drunken stupor before his fireplace one night and dreamed up a coherent explanation for resonance structures (and in particular rings; much of modern dye chemistry is influenced by these resonance structures which interact as you might expect with the UV/Visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum)? Of course in hindsight it is hard to play what-if games, but it is inarguable that pure science has contributed to commercial gain.
Naturally there has to be a linkage of some sort to allow advances in the pure sciences to be translated to the commercial world, but the field of research commercialization is an active one at most universities. I think you would find a busy R&D commercialization office at any major research institution, eager to license their discoveries to commercial suitors. Sometimes that linkage is long or indirect (how could JCM have anticipated the Internet, or e-commerce? Even more recent theoreticians like V. Bush in the 40s were wildly off the mark, more remarkable for the scant bits they got right than the majority they got wrong.), but it exists!
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I disagree, in fact, I think gov't *should* fund science, especially basic science. Corporations, as a general rule, don't do basic research. They cherry-pick from academic science those bits that they think can be made profitable. If you want gov't funding of science to end, you need to either figure out a way for private funding of basic research (remembering, of course, that it needs to be open and peer-reviewed), or
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What the hell are you talking about? Government funding organizations want to fund working research projects. They don't want to fund something that isn't going anywhere. If a project gets good, interesting results, it will continue to get funding as long as there is enough money to go around. That and researchers don't want to keep working on a non-working project because it doesn't help with publicat
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So what are you saying - that some of the smartest and most dedicated people you know are unable to fund their research?
There are many advances that have no immediate commercial or practical value, but have nonetheless made a truly massive difference to society and the economy, and have opened up many new avenu
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Hi, are you an american? I am not, but I do know for a fact you don't love the idea of Russians, Japanese and Chinese (to name a few) being better at scientific advances than you are, do you?
Would you like a Japanese expedition to be the first to bring humans to mars just because they found out an extremely new "market useless physics thing" that allowed them to faster space travel ?
I would personally love to see t
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