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Admiring progress: Mandelson visits a cancer research lab. Credit: JOHN STILLWELL/PA

The British government last week chose the occasion of the publication of its white paper on industrial competitiveness (see left) to launch the second phase of its Foresight exercise.

The Foresight initiative was launched by the previous Conservative government with the aim of stimulating scientists and industrialists to think about how science can be better targeted at creating wealth and improving the quality of life.

The Department for Education and Employment has written to the higher-education funding councils saying that it expects them to promote Foresight, and to take appropriate steps “to maximize the commercial exploitation of university research”.

This is among the first signs that Foresight priorities, which have come to dominate the allocation of the annual £1 billion (US$1.68 billion) research budget from the four scientific research councils, will also influence the education department's research allocations.

The decision to launch the new Foresight exercise illustrates the government's commitment to its usefulness as a device for structuring research policy. But there is some unease within the Office of Science and Technology over the ‘spin’ given to it by Peter Mandelson and Lord Sainsbury in their presentation of the launch.

Both ministers emphasized Foresight's potential contribution to economic competitiveness. But the second phase had initially been designed under Mandelson's predecessor Margaret Beckett, to tone down this aspect and to increase the emphasis on finding ways of using research to raise the quality of life (Nature 393, 8; 1998).

The emphasis is less on finding technologies that would benefit particular industrial sectors, and more on getting scientists and industrialists to focus on various interdisciplinary ‘themes’ such as ageing, healthcare and crime prevention.