Britain's MRC is to set aside £8 million ($13.5 million) over the next four years to attract and fund high-level researchers from outside the UK. Funding will come from the extra £90 million that the MRC will receive over the next three years.

The International Appointments Initiative is being established to help both universities and the MRC research centers and units recruit prominent researchers from overseas. Shortly after the release of the new budget figures, for example, it was announced that the prominent spongiform encephalopathy researcher, Charles Weissman, currently at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, is to join the staff of a new prion research unit.

In recent years, the MRC has attracted a number of prominent researchers to Britain, one of the first being the neuroscientist Robert Plomin, an expert in the genetic basis of cognitive function, who was appointed three years ago to a top research post at the MRC's Institute of Psychiatry in London. But once such an individual was appointed, they have then had to begin submitting their own grant applications.

The new Initiative is intended to avoid this process. Once an investigator has been identified as a potential recruit to Britain's biomedical research community, they will be able to negotiate a grant from the new fund as part of the recruitment process. "We want to be able to offer people a bit of a package up front," says a senior MRC official. And some of the extra money going to the MRC will go to expanding postgraduate training and postdoctoral career opportunities in priority areas.

Sir George Radda

Sir George Radda, chief executive of the MRC , describes the overall budget settlement, in which science received a greater a proportional increase than any other single element of public funding, as "a vote of confidence in the research community." He is particularly pleased with the government's decision to provide a firm budget commitment over three years, and not just one year as has been the government's practice in recent years. "This move recognizes that research is a long-term business, and will make forward planning for us very much easier," he told Nature Medicine.