The job of chief scientific adviser to the British government has long entailed large doses of frustration — the position has come with no direct authority over the civil servants who control the research programmes of individual government departments. “I do not have an authority, I have merely an advisory capacity,” the previous incumbent, Robert May, told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in February 2000.

As a result, insular attitudes frequently got in the way of a coherent approach to research and the provision of scientific advice — dynamics that contributed to the initially sluggish response to the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that last year devastated British agriculture.

Chemist David King, who took over as chief scientific adviser at the end of 2000, was given a baptism of fire by foot-and-mouth. But the crisis made him focus him on the need to change the culture that dissuaded the now-defunct Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from seeking the independent advice that might have prevented matters getting so badly out of hand. When interviewed last summer, King talked of the need to “parachute in” experts from academia and industry to replace the career civil servants who have long held sway over science within individual ministries (see Nature 412, 472–473; 2001).

It is encouraging, therefore, to see that King's fingerprints are on the government's new science strategy, unveiled last week (see page 472). Every department with an appreciable science budget must now appoint its own chief scientific adviser who will have direct access to their cabinet minister. King will presumably corral this group of experts to exert the coordinating influence that his predecessors were unable to muster.

No one should underestimate the difficulty of challenging the prevailing culture of Britain's civil service. But encouragingly, King seems to have the backing of Britain's two most powerful politicians, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. He also deserves the support of the wider British scientific community, which stands to gain a stronger voice within government.