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British Government Slashes Scientific Research
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."
Funding for the physical sciences (among others) in the United States has been facing a lot of difficulties lately as well. Failure of the congress to pass the new budget has caused a crisis in science funding from agencies such as the NSF and NIH that supply much of the money for taxpayer funded research in the states. This threatens to close major facilities*, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work.
Concerned citizens are encouraged to write to their congressmen to not forget the cause of advancement in the US. Instead of bemoaning the loss of the US edge in the sciences , 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."
68 million British pounds = 133.17800 million U.S. dollars
google is your friend!
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...
I always cringe when I read something that sounds like it has been taken from a red top tabloid - "slashed". I almost expected the byline to read "phew what a scorcher!".
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 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.
Don't get ahead of yourself, there! 68 million pounds worth of surveillance cameras?
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, like my trip to Honolulu and the camera company's CEO's "consulting" fees.
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TOTAL: 57 million pounds
That leaves only 11 million pounds to spend on security cameras. Check my math, but it should be right. I think you owe someone an apology. And in the future, please check your facts before posting comments that disparage our benevolent rulers.
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'.
Almost all significant research in physics and physical chemistry is done with government funding. But thanks for trolling this thread with wild misinformation.
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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