The Diminishing Support for Biomedical Research in Much of the Developed World. (July 5, 2013)

Colin Macilwain in his analytical piece for the July 3, 2013 issue of Cell discussed the falling support, public and private, for biomedical R&D. Here, a couple of excerpts pertinent to "the lucky country".

In Canada, a March budget allocated an extra C$160 million to Genome Canada over 3 years, as well as C$220 million for research infrastructure. But overall spending at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) will fall by 3%. "The focus is to deal with the deficit and throw research a few bones," says Paul Dufour, a long-time adviser on Canadian research policy based in Quebec.

Australia’s economy, like Canada’s, has performed relatively well since 2008, but even so, research there has fallen victim to austerity. Although Warwick Anderson, a physiologist and chief executive of the National Health and Medical Research Council, says that its 2013 budget is "basically in steady state," he admits that this "has come as a bit of a surprise; people had been used to growth."

But Australian universities complain that last October’s midyear budget whisked away some A$500 million in overhead payments that they had been planning for over the next 4 years and that inflation is also eating into the value of grants. "There’s been a steady chipping away of what’s available," says Brendan Crabb, a microbiologist and president of the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI).

"We’ve got this system that’s pump-primed all these young people, and now there’s nowhere for them to go," says Crabb at the AAMRI. For some, attention is turning to what they should be told to do instead. "Only one in ten postdocs is going to become a principal investigator," says [Mark Downs, chief executive of the Society of Biology in London]. "This hasn’t been conveyed to them powerfully enough."