Sir

Adelino V. M. Canário calls for a dramatic change in the way Portuguese science is funded and managed (Nature 390, 656; 1997). There is certainly a need for change, but it should be less dramatic, better organized and not based on fallacious assumptions.

His graph of gross domestic product versus number of publications in European countries is meaningless on its own. It brings to mind the study showing that high expenditure on soap in hospitals correlates very significantly with the number of deaths, which does not mean that soap consumption contributes to mortality.

Similarly, it must be remembered that 24 years ago, and after almost half a century of dictatorship, Portugal, with its 25% illiteracy level, matched standards in developing countries while in Ireland there was no illiteracy. Illiteracy has now been almost eradicated in Portugal and about 32% of secondary school students enrol in universities. So, within one generation, a revolution has occurred within the public education and research sector.

At present, these changes need to prove their usefulness for a society which is asked to finance science in the universities. It is true that academic institutions suffer from chronically low funding. However, it is also true that the lack of direct evaluation of academic staff (by students) is responsible for the frequently low quality of teaching in universities. As a result, individuals with a poor teaching record may easily reach senior tenure positions within the academic hierarchy.

Furthermore, progress in an academic career is often unrelated to scientific productivity and more or less guaranteed by a law ensuring lifelong teaching contracts, which provide little incentive to publish.

There are several bottlenecks in planning and managing research activities, but they have nothing to do with any excessive weight that undergraduate students may have in electing governing bodies at the universities. Canário confuses the issues.

In our opinion, these obstacles are mostly due to:

• lengthy evaluation of research and development project proposals at a national level (up to two years);

• delays in transferring funds to the universities for execution of projects (up to one year);

• anachronistic administrative rules and an acute shortage of skilled administrative officers capable of handling the administration of research projects;

• overburdening of researchers with minor administrative duties (often as much as 80% of useful time), which transforms them into amateurish accountants.

So, before more funds are made available, as Canário asks, the administration of research at universities should be fundamentally restructured so that scientists are held accountable for the scientific results they produce rather than for their book-keeping. A strengthening of research units should provide them with the necessary basic equipment and should not be transformed into long-term funding which is quickly taken for granted. The competition for funding of research ideas between research centres is a sound system which has worked well in the past and should not be changed.

Beyond the research goals set by the European Commission in Brussels, new scientific programmes should take into greater consideration the priorities of both the national public and private sectors and include, in the case of Portugal, the once blooming but now almost abandoned research sector in Africa.