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."
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.
68 million British pounds = 133.17800 million U.S. dollars
google is your friend!
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.
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.
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)
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.
I'm impressed at how much effort you put into that sarky reply. Hats off to you, sir :)
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.
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.
The problem with that is you have no idea what pure research is useful and which isn't. Here's a quote I found that is a good sum up:
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.
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'.
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.
Almost all significant research in physics and physical chemistry is done with government funding. But thanks for trolling this thread with wild misinformation.
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.
Unless you're psychic it is awfully hard to tell which branches of "pure" science will turn out to be really useful "applied" science later.
For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory 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 research will prove valuable in the future.
I'm not saying that this justifies spending a fortune on any and every "pure" science project we can come up with but funding some of them provides a tremendous net benefit for society.
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.
Wasn't it AOL?
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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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)
"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.
anything more than an hours drive for me turns into a swim.
http://www.doreymedia.com - Accessible Web Design in Surrey UK
That is not surprising if you think of traditional British car manufacturing values like Rover reliability, Rover quality and Rover useability. Just along Rover fat cat board bonus (67 million with the company bleeding red ink all over) vs British salary and let's just add Rover asset stripping for good measure.
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 election. There was no way in hell it would have survived in the first place and Antonio Bliar govt repeatedly lied to the public (nothing new here) and flaunted EU rules on state aid to try to keep it alive first by supporting the "british industrialist" group which bought it from BMW and asset stripped it (that is Alchemy partnership specialty by the way), then providing financial assistance bridge package after it went under.
As a result now science and education all over the country have to suffer (not by much, but Rover is not the only cockup, there will be more chickens flying having home to roost and having diahorea).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You are full of shit. There is no way Business School Product is going to understand the need for basic science. They don't have what it takes to get it. Business School Product only cares about what is going into the next quarter's financial report because that is how they get rewarded. Their only goal is to retire at 40 and become a bloodsucking parasite on the rest of society for the rest of their miserable lives.
Recall quantum theory? You might also recall it being associated with computer chips. Try getting funding out of a corporate drone for "I wish to investigate the fundamental properties of matter". The response will be, "Sure, just show us how we can incorporate it into our products for next year". And you say, "Uh, it could take several decades". Response, "Hahahahaha...get out of here, you joker!".
Recall DNA? Watson and Crick. "We wish to investigate the fundamental properties that make cells do what they do, it will take 30 years to be useful" Think you are going to get funding?
Transistors? Computable functions? "We wish to investigate what functions are computable in a formal sense?", "Errr...what can we do with them?", "We do not yet know but we expect within 20 years we'll be able to build machines that can compute them". "Why? Will it pay for my vacation home next year?".
Number theory? "We wish to investigate the fundamental properties of numbers.", "Not in this company you won't, we cannot use it for anything?"...maybe encryption means something to you?
Einstein? "I wish to investigate the fundamental forces of nature?" "What? On this company's dime?". Maybe you recall satellites use relativity to properly handle signals?
Gerry