News & Views item - February 2009

 

 

The Contagion of the Bureaucratic Mindset. (February 13, 2009)

ScienceInsider produced the following item. The bureaucracy which spawned the RAE continues to gestate and issue mice.

 

February 12, 2009

Is the (Blue) Sky Falling in the U.K?

Calling for a "modest revolt," 20 United Kingdom scientists, including one Nobel laureate and eight Royal Society fellows, have launched a scathing attack on the U.K.'s seven research councils for now requiring grant applications to include a 2-page statement on the economic impact of the proposed work. In a letter to the Times Higher Education (THE), they call for peer-reviewers to ignore those summaries, arguing that they have no business predicting what research may produce an economic windfall. They also blame this financial mindset and a lack of private industry investment for causing a decline in the U.K.'s leadership in science, as reflected in a decreasing frequency of Nobel Prizes.

In a news story, THE notes a response by Philip Esler, chief executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, that includes this comment:

Research councils will not be disadvantaging blue-skies research, nor stifling creativity. The impact statement is not designed to ask peer reviewers or applicants to predict future benefits. It is intended to allow the applicant to highlight potential pathways to impact, especially through collaboration with partners, and to help the research councils support them in these activities.

—John Travis

 

Below are the signatories to the THE letter:

 

Donald W. Braben, University College London,

 

and the following who also sign in a personal capacity:

John F. Allen, Queen Mary, University of London;

Tim Birkhead FRS, University of Sheffield;

David Colquhoun FRS, UCL;

Adam Curtis, University of Glasgow;

John Dainton FRS, University of Liverpool;

Andre Geim FRS, University of Manchester;

Pat Heslop-Harrison, University of Leicester;

Tony Horsewill, University of Nottingham;

Sir Harry Kroto FRS, Florida State University, Tallahassee and Nobel laureate;

Peter Lawrence FRS, Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge;

Philip Moriarty, Nottingham; Andrew Oswald, University of Warwick;

David Ray, BioAstral Ltd; Ken Seddon, Queen's University Belfast;

Steve Sparks FRS, University of Bristol; Nick Tyler, UCL;

Claudio Vita-Finzi, Natural History Museum;

Phil Woodruff FRS, Warwick.