hobart

Researchers in New Zealand are feeling the effects of their country's economic recession. The halt to a projected increase in funding for basic research means that the success rate of applications to the Marsden Fund, the main source of such support, has remained at about last year's level of eight per cent in the 1998 round.

In the fourth year since it was launched, the fund — named after Sir Ernest Marsden, founding secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which the government closed in 1991 — is giving NZ$6.9 million (US$3.4 million) to 63 new projects out of 757 applications.

In the 1996 round, 13 per cent of grant applications were successful. But the rate fell to about eight per cent last year when the government required that the grants cover the full costs of the research, with no funding coming from other sources.

The annual allocation for the fund has remained constant this year at NZ$22 million (US$10.8 million), with no allowance for inflation. About one-third was allocated to new projects, most going to support continuing projects from previous rounds.

The government had previously stated that support for the Marsden Fund was projected to grow to 10 per cent of the value of the Public Good Science Fund, which has received NZ$317 million this year. But this goal was dropped in the May 1998 budget (see Nature 393, 198; 1998).

Projects from seven broad disciplinary areas were selected by a panel of experts. The life sciences was the most successful category overall, with 19 grants. Universities dominate the successful institutions, with 49 grants; seven are shared among various Crown Research Institutes, and the remaining seven among private research institutes and individuals.

Research already supported by the fund includes the production of the first Bose- Einstein condensate by physicists at the University of Otago last August, and the elucidation of fish navigation by researchers at the University of Auckland (M. M. Walker et al. Nature 390, 371–376; 1997).

George Petersen, president of the Academy of the Royal Society of New Zealand, described the Marsden Fund as “a key component” in overall science funding in the country, and expressed his “deep disappointment” at its curtailment.

With the country's economy falling into recession, many commentators consider it unlikely that the government will reverse the downward drift in its support of research in the near future.