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Secure: budget increase guarantees Britain's role in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Credit: CERN

Britain's physical scientists expressed both surprise and concern last week at the relatively large proportion of an extra £300 million (US$500 million) being made available to research councils over the next three years that has been reserved for the life sciences.

In revealing how this extra money, first promised in July, is to be divided between research areas, the Department of Trade and Industry has announced that a key priority is to secure a “major expansion in molecular, biomolecular and biomedical research” (see Nature 395, 825; 1998 ).

In addition to a significant increase in funding for the Medical Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has been told to spend £60 million of its £86 million extra income on research that underpins the work of the biomedical and environmental research councils.

The government is also to invest £35 million in DIAMOND, a planned synchrotron radiation source, in addition to £110 million pledged by the Wellcome Trust. There will also be at least 57 new research fellowships, of which 12 are reserved for women, funded by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Research into climate change, ageing, information technology and communications will also be given funding priority, although precise amounts have yet to be specified. But funding for particle physics and astronomy research will stay constant in real terms for the next three years.

Senior physicists say they had expected the biomedical and environmental sciences to do well in the distribution. But few expected them to walk away with almost 80 per cent of the extra money, leaving physical scientists and engineers working outside priority areas with £46 million.

Particle physicists and astronomers will receive £20 million of this, an increase in real terms of just over half a per cent. This will be used for, among other things, supporting Britain's contribution to international projects such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. The funds will also be used for new fellowships for mid-career scientists, and a fund for new and innovative projects.

Other physical scientists whose work has no bearing on the environmental or biological sciences could fare worse. It is not yet known if their extra £26 million represents a real-terms increase on present budgets.

Ken Pounds, head of the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Leicester, and a former chief executive of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), admits that the overall situation has left many physicists unhappy.

“I personally think [keeping spending roughly level in real terms] is good news and reverses a 20-year trend,” says Pounds. “But the situation is no better than marking time. It keeps [physics] alive.”

Cashmore: division was ‘a little peculiar’. Credit: OXFORD UNIVERSITY

Roger Cashmore, chairman of the department of physics at the University of Oxford, describes the distribution between the research councils as “a little peculiar”, and thinks it is “somewhat unfortunate” that his own area of particle physics “did not do well at all”.

Officials from PPARC and the EPSRC have greeted the extra funds as a long-awaited and much appreciated boost to their incomes.

The previous funding decline had led PPARC to close down the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Cambridge, a telescope building facility, and merge some of its work with the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, creating a new Astronomy Technology Centre. The closure allows PPARC to invest £11 million in its domestic programme.

PPARC and EPSRC welcome the chance to plan their expenditure over three years instead of just one. PPARC officials are also pleased by the decision of the government's Office of Science and Technology to hold an additional £30 million to guarantee Britain's contribution to existing international projects, such as the European Space Agency, in the event of currency fluctuations.

But privately their relief is said to be tempered with some concern. No one wants to complain, as that might seem ungrateful. But the feeling in the community, says one official, is: “When you give a starving man a slice of bread, he's really happy; but when he sees his chums eating cake, it hurts,” he says. “That's how some of us feel right now.”

Some officials are concerned that the imbalance in the distribution of the research funds may also be reflected in the distribution of an additional £600 million fund for research infrastructure, half of which is being provided by the Wellcome Trust (see Nature 395, 422; 1998 ).

The trust's status as a biomedical research charity means that at least £300 million will be spent on biomedical research. But there are concerns that the overall proportion may be much greater. Indeed, questions have been asked as to whether the trust's involvement will skew the allocation of the overall fund towards the life sciences.

Asked to address this point by members of the House of Commons' science and technology committee last week, Mike Dexter, director of the trust, said that there were no strings attached to the overall funds. Indeed, Sainsbury, the science minister, said the trust's contribution to research infrastructure funding meant that, in total, the government was able to devote more funds to the physical sciences than it might otherwise have done.

Although there is disagreement over the proportion of research funds reserved for the life sciences, few doubted that life sciences would receive more than the physical sciences. Not only does it reflect a similar development in the United States, but it also ties in with the government's stated priorities to fund research that enhances its social and economic goals.

The government firmly takes the view that science is the bedrock of economic success. One of its stated goals, announced with the three-year allocations, is that the public-sector science base should contribute to a 50 per cent increase annually in the number of companies set up.

The government is aware that Britain is home to some of the world's leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Partly because of this, much of the investment in the life sciences will focus on exploiting the data to emerge from the Human Genome Project.

According to some, the economic potential of research, particularly in the life sciences, was a key factor on which Britain's finance ministry, the Treasury, agreed to release the extra funds in the first place.

The requirement that the EPSRC uses much of its new money to support the work in the life and environmental sciences is welcomed by one senior research council official as an opportunity for physical scientists and engineers to use their skills in other fields.

But he believes the government may be putting too much faith in the idea that high-quality research is essential for commercial success. Japan's prosperous automobile and electronics companies succeeded not by having the world's best research, he says, but primarily by having higher productivity than Britain.