Wellcome Trust to Award Longer-term Funding Focused on Individual Researchers Rather Than on Specific Research Projects. (November 12, 2009)

While the UK continues to agonise over how to replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and Australian academe, driven by Labor's Minister for Innovation. Industry, Science an Research, Kim Carr, tries to make sense of an Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) to calculate block research funding for universities, as though they were self-sustaining dehumanised entities, Britain's largest non-governmental funder of biomedical research, the Wellcome Trust, has come to the conclusion, according to Mark Walport, director of the Trust, that: "The best way to fund science is to fund people."

According to Nature's Natasha Gilbert: "The trust has yet to agree the exact amount of money it will commit to the Investigator Awards but expects it to be about the same amount that it currently awards to project and programme grants, which totalled around £110 million (A$195 million) in 2008.

Dr Walport told Ms Gilbert that while written application will still be required, researchers and their ideas will be assessed primarily through interviews, "we don't want people to focus on the precise details of how the particular experiment will be done". The awards will be for terms of five to seven-years.

The trust believes the its Investigator Award funding will be unique in the UK. However the US' Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) for a quarter century has operated a similar scheme utilising short written applications outlining a broad scientific question, followed by a more detailed interview. Winners are given total freedom to spend the money on any medical research question they wish to pursue, and Jack Dixon, HHMI vice-president and chief scientific officer, told Ms Gilbert: "Traditional grants don't look so favourably on researchers if they venture outside the area they said they were going to tackle" and went on to add that giving researchers the freedom to pursue discoveries made along the way produces "better science".

Jim Smith, director of the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, UK, says the approach is more honest because it acknowledges that science has often moved on between the grant application being made and work actually beginning.

Unfortunately, from the political -- or university administrative -- micro-managerial viewpoint, the approach is not particularly palatable.