Slashdot Mirror
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."
68 million pounds buys a lot of surveillance cameras.
Pure science can't really fund itself. Applied science does fine, because applied scientists can turn their science into products and services.
I don't respond to AC's.
I'm a fan of getting the State out of science entirely[...]
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.
Since when did stupidity become fasionable on Slashdot?
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).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Because while pure science may not have many direct benefits, its indirect benefits may include opening new areas of research for applied science--which does give benefits.
Which corporation was it that invented the Internet again?
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
"it has gotten to the point that I don't even bother talking with them as all I'll hear is how the didn't get a certain grant or how they have to figure out a way to keep one for the next year or three."
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.
Those corporations often rely on advancements in SCIENCE, largely funded publicly (NASA, DARPA are two huge examples I might toss out there), to allow them to develop TECHNOLOGY.. applied science.
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.
Pure science is discovering that ions exist, and that you can use ions to push things around.
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).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I don't think you understand how modern science works.
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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"Most US advances are not made with government money. It just doesn't work that way."
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.
One hardly knows where to begin. The Brits deserve a lot of credit for their "sealing wax and string" approach to science. Read Crick (and Watson), Max Perutz, Rosalind Franklin, etc. (Fred Sanger and many others for the 'real' afficianados out there.) Some of the comments on slashdot seem to imply that academic researchers are a bunch of lazy sobs who are only interested in feathering their nests... Couldn't be further from the truth. "It's the people, stupid" to paraphrase a lot of stuff out there. What is amusing to someone who's been on both sides of the table (academics and industry) is that when you push the people who complain about the training in the Universities concerning what they want, they usually do not have any constructive suggestions. "Send us smart people who are well trained" is usually what you hear. And we are actually pretty good at this on the university side. So it is sad to hear about what is happening to funding in the UK. They are very good at doing tremendous work on a shoestring, as are the people in the US. Good luck getting the same quantity and quality work done from "contract research." Mr. B.
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 to program X.
That said, smart bureaucrats will never allow money to be left over in a budget since that would give legislators the impression that they don't need the money. They hold the EOY orgy of acquisition. That's government 101.
No matter where you go, there you are.