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SPA Archive
June 2006
SPATalk
Science and Peace in Antarctica
Twin tracks to tackle climate challenge
Budget throws sensitivities into relief
News in Brief
Morality,theology and action on climate change
What are we going to do about the decline in chemistry students?
The psychology of terrorism
Science meets policy
Where did texting come from?
The self-sorting tendency
Physics in the City
Young people and gambling problems
Deaf people and linguistic research
Food labelling in Europe - We need information for the majority
Food labelling in Europe - We want nutrition labelling
Food labelling in Europe - It's a mess
Mobile phones and children - Voluntary Code
Mobile phones and children - Children face risks
Mobile phones and children-UK code of practice
And then there was one
Joys and duties of a scientist
Scientists in the pay of industry
Creationism reviving; science recruitment declining
All hail the new Science Supremo
Budget throws sensitivities into relief
The 2006 budget stimulated important debates on issues where its implications intersect with science and research policy.
The most prominent reactions came from three areas. The first, a boost to science teaching to the tune of £30.5m over the next two years, aimed at recruiting 3,000 extra science teachers, met with almost unanimous approval.
However, the Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK (CASE) said that still more is needed – especially since, without a policy to reverse the trend of university science department closures, they could not foresee where the science teachers will come from.
Fate of the RAE
The second, a call for the abolition of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), made plain the divisions within the academic community on the proposal.
While CASE said it couldn’t happen soon enough, as did many newer universities, Universities UK (UUK) took a more cautious line. ‘UUK has an open mind as to what should happen post RAE 2008, but we would not want to see the abolition of the RAE without a viable alternative, which has the full confidence of the academic community, to replace it,’ the organisation said, adding that it looked forward to taking part in a full debate on the alternatives.
The alternatives in question revolve around the use of ‘metrics’ to establish the research merits of a department, such as grant income from external funding sources and citation counts.
The Royal Society appears to take an even more guarded line. Although it welcomed the government's intention to move towards ‘a simpler and less burdensome system’, Lord Martin Rees later defended the RAE in a House of Lords debate, in which he said that it offered a refined method of discrimination, and that using metrics alone could risk discriminating against researchers who produce ‘brilliant work on minimal resources’.
The Russell Group, an association of 19 major research-intensive universities, had not at the time of writing formed a consensus opinion.
Medical research
The third announcement of interest to the research community was that the government-allocated research funds of the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Health Service (NHS) would be merged to create a single fund of ‘at least £1 billion’. This was warmly welcomed by the MRC, and also by CASE, who saw potential for the NHS research budget to be used more effectively.
But the Association for the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) saw potential pitfalls, warning: ‘It is essential that this amalgamation does not put at risk the pre-clinical research base – a vital part of the MRC’s remit – that has been the foundation of pharmaceutical industry R&D investment’.
Vanessa Spedding is the Shorts editor
vs@mortimerpress.com