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"
68 million squiggles? Wow that sounds like a lot in dollars!
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 pounds buys a lot of surveillance cameras.
...except it would be better if there was an equivalent tax slash, too.
The role of the government shouldn't be to fund every kind of research under the sun. All government organizations are inefficient, and jockey more for position and power than for results. If a government organization could obtain positive results, it would mean they couldn't ask for more money.
I'm a fan of getting the State out of science entirely -- let the market produce what the market has a demand for, not for pie-in-the-sky results that never seem to be worth the cost to taxpayers and the economy as a whole. While there are certainly cases where government research led to something positive for the average taxpayer, there are many more situations where that spending was negative for most, if not all.
I personally know so many college-educated Ph.Ds and all who are constantly trying to get grants so they don't have to go into the "real world" that it disgusts me. Some of the smartest graduates of my high-ranked high school fit this description, and 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.
Intelligent design would win!
Where/how can I see what money is being spent on what? Isn't every public grant of research money supposed to be viewable online by now?
..so if you know yours tell me.
Yeah I am asking about every country
The big bag has come and gone. Why don't we study platform shoes and flare pants from the 60s!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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...
A friend of mine worked at one of their offices. He had two words to describe it: Holiday Camp.
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.
Apparently we've got to buy some more nuclear missiles from the USA to replace our old ones (or is that hire from some US company, I can never remember).
The money's got to come from somewhere!
Ignorance is Strength! (TM)
So is the U.K. filling up with radical militant Christian future terrorists (Evangelicals) pushing intelligent design bull too?
In any case, looks more like budget tweaking compared to the overall budget then a mass cutback.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Drat, that inconvenient "context" thing comes in and totally screws the whole story. I suppose I could blame the editors, but we all know how useful that would be. I know, I'll blame our pathetic educational system, yeah :)
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.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
With all of the paranoia being caused by jobs being shipped to other countries, I don't see how this is going to help things any. One of the job areas that has been staying in the US/UK is the research and development market. Many companies are keeping their research here and moving their production facilities to other countries. With the surge in scientists and engineers that China and Asia are producing it would be a small wonder if companies didn't start moving their R/D facilities out as well. If there aren't any incentives for people to become engineers/scientists here (through cutting in research funding or cutting in education grants) then we could start losing more jobs to other countries, some of our higher-paying, technical jobs.
Does anyone know, is that 29 million cut for the EPSRC higher because they get more money in the first place, or are they specifically cutting back more on Engineering?
As a socially-responsible country, the UK government has to fund NHS to greater and greater levels. The UK is taking in lots of new immigrants and this requires more and more health care spending.
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 margin that there still is a NASA. It will be clear how things went when NASA is de-funded to support health care.
and with the strings attached its not always wanted either.
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 problem that isn't as drastic, let alone far reaching as many claim it is. What harms science is regulation an inteference by government, not lack of funds from it
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well, in Britain's defense, that money is much better used at its new recipient, the Ministry of Silly Walks. They've been in need of additional funding for quite some time now to compete with foreign, Silly Walking threats.
OMG!!1!!LOLZ!!1 teh fundies are taking over the UK the government's totally in their pocket cause fundamentalists don't want the TRUTH to come out about science see this is proof it MAKES SENSE FREE WILLY!
Hrm. How come that sort of reaction is not elicited by science budget cuts in the UK but it rears its ugly head for the same here in the US?
People please. What's with this is money for science talk. What if the terrorist blows up a train? There need to be more cameras capable of interpreting what it sees through its lenses. Come on. Get your priorities straight.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I'm feeling really pessimistic about life today...
:)
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
You can say you're not a troll as often as you like, but you still smell like a troll. Waddle back under the bridge. Take a few books with you and learn up a bit, will ya?
Hummm ... no new money, eh for that CRUCIAL heavy iceball ... er, ion collider. Hellsbells how do they expect to find the Higgs with an accelerator bearly big enough to accelerate lead ... and Higgs must be the size of a baseball !!! Obviously we need more cork-infested baseball bats and LOTS of steroids ...
Are getting too close a cancer cure or hyper fuel efficiency and the Big Oil or Big Pharm are shutting them down via political arm twisting.
states That there if you don't
Hate to be replying to my own post... however, the link to the NYtimes article regarding science funding in the US can be read without registration/TimesSelect only via the following link
£29 million reduction
R
This is a sensationalist garbage headline, without a percentage it is irrelevant. If it is 29 million out of 30 million, that is a bigger deal than 29 million out of 29 billion. Apparently education has already been slashed MILLIONS. Now the headline should have read that it was slashed by 1/3 (assuming the money isn't just being redistributed via a different route. Not knowing UK funding I wouldn't know, but in the US 'cuts' are sometimes actually increases with the money flowing differently).
I live in the UK and my local government is looking to spend an obscene amount of money to ensure that the special religious needs of children are met in schools. How much of that money could have been spent on science equipment?
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 funding continues.
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!
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I guess they needed four additional Eurofighters. Got to have 'em all! Or is that Pokemon? I always get the two confused.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
If they changed from monarchy to republic. Or else create some little Elvises in the cities where the problems are.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
When there's money left over, the budget is reduced the following fiscal year by the excess amount the prior fiscal year. That's the way the UK Government funds things, which is why there is a desperate scramble at the end of the year to buy useless, expensive items to flush the rest of the budget. Take a look at the spending pattern of any of the UK county councils.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Despite the context of immigration increasing health care costs etc, as well as the inflammatory edge to the comment, the parent actually makes a really good point.
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 the like?
I am not against scientific research investment, quite the opposite, but that does NOT change the fact that there is only a finite amount of resources to go around.
I'm sure if the parent had posted his point in a thread concerning declining health care budgets, he'd be modded insightful, however inflammatory. Mod points are NOT meant to be used to disagree with someone (yes yes, this IS slashdot..)
Ice Cream has no bones.
It looks like sanity may have temporarily prevailed and funding's been increased for some American science. Science 23 February 2007:Vol. 315. no. 5815, pp. 1062 - 1063 (sorry no linky-unless you're at a uni you probably gotta pay) says that the NSF's budget increased by $334 million, matching it's 2007 request (NSF they say has a $4.4 billion budget). NIH also got a boost of $612 million, and the DOE $200 million. So that's about 1.1 billion, or for the median 'merican that increase is less than half a Big Mac a year--truly a fucking bargain. However according to the article science is still expecting hard times in 2008. Not that the last couple of years have been a picnic by any means...
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.
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 cost of living issue (professors need their BMW's too...)
I mean even kids' science fair projects have gotten way too expensive (robotics anyone?).
In a world were you need to buy fresh water, practicing science is becoming a privilege vs. a right.
And the $ is squiggly as well. Your point? Or were you trying to be funny, but instead looked like an ignoramus?
The dumber you get, the stronger they get!
They gotta cut costs somewhere when you are expecting other operating costs to go through the roof. Like M$ says, the purchase price is just the start of TCO. Science, who needs science when we can have mid 90s style INNOVATION. Whooo.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ow! My eyes hurt. *rub*
Oh please. The parent is just another "OMG Socialism!" troll just written better. The reduction has not been because of the NHS at all. Just like the jackass who mentioned security cameras earlier he is trying to shanghai this discussion so he can make political points. I swear I could use the "British Topic Bingo Card" image I got off Fark.com in this discussion and get pretty close to a full house. Anyone care to mention that the British have bad teeth? That would real help me out.
For the real reason for this cut in funding see this post.
We've precious little land, barely any natural resources, and no manufacturing industry to speak of left.
I thought the "Knowledge Economy" was where our future was at. Apparently not.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
At least they now can afford to put up some more cameras to see what these unemployed researchers are doing...
It's sucking all of the regular resources out to cover their high-tech hi-jinks.
Oh please. Has science spending been cut to fund faith schools? No. Maybe you have a problem with religion (I might also), but this is a different discussion. The British government tried to bail out Rover. It was a valiant attempt to keep a few more workers working and off benefit. It didn't work, there's a short term pinch. It happens. Oh, and I work on an EPSRC funded project, so yes, I do care.
That tw*t Tony Blair is too busy giving away my money to immigrants & the unemployed to worry about using it to do something useful with it, that might actually do some good.
No, really !
The introduction does not state that £68 million is a drop of about one third. The drop was from £196 to £128 million.
There may be an element of truth to this (as there is with all good jokes), but it is clearly a joke. What retarded Mod thought this was informative? There isn't even the excuse of wanting to give karma for the joke since it was written by an AC.
"Windoze"!! My god man, you are so clever! I mean, you see so many comedians here on Slashdot but rarely one with your depth and reach. And "M$"? Bwahahahahahah!!!! You came up with that all by yourself?? Bwahahahahahah!!!
Pure science can't really fund itself. Applied science does fine, because applied scientists can turn their science into products and services.
I wonder if somebody has thought about a system where royalties on this kind of pure science (from the applied sciences) could be paid back into a pool, funding further science. It would change the current model, but if anything it would accelerate the amount of science done and not leave it beholden to Congress every year.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I hope someone else has already pointed out that this is hardly a "slash". It is small change out of a massive amount of money. The real story is that now that the defender of the budget, Lord Sainsbury, has gone the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) feels that it can raid the science budget to pay for its own incompetent financial management. It is sad that the UK press has handled this story so badly. They even failed to say where the money has gone. I loved the bit where they take money from the Research Council that supports research in electronics to pay for thew DTI's failure to get its act together on Europe's electronic waste initiatives. More here: http://michaelkenward.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-am-su rprised-that-none-of-reports.html
MK