The British government's recognition that life sciences are the key to economic success in the new millenium has been confirmed financially in the distribution of its science budget, which is to increase by an additional £1.4 billion ($2 billion) over the next three years. Details of how the money will be divided up among the six Research Councils were announced last month.

The two Councils devoted to biomedical research—the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)—receive substantially greater increases (£90.15 and £52.26 million respectively), for the period FY99 to FY02, than do Councils supporting particle physics, astronomy, economics, social and environmental research. This is a reflection of the government's desire to expand biomolecular and genomics research, in which it believes the UK is "already excellent and has some world class companies operating at the forefront of the technology."

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) receives an £86.66 million increase and, under new initiatives, has been told to spend £60 million of this in supporting the MRC, the BBSRC and the Natural Environment Research Council, to ensure that "the classical sciences underpinning progress in the life sciences are reinforced." In particular, the EPSRC must focus on the application of information technology in bioinformatics and in data management for functional genomics.

In addition to the increased funding, this is the first time that the Research Councils have been given three-year fixed budget allocations.

The MRC has wasted no time in announcing target areas on which its new allocation will be spent. These are the development of a human genetic database, basic and clinical genomics research and bioinformatics.

The first of the new programs is the establishment of a new £8 million cancer research center in Cambridge, focusing on translational research, to be headed by Ron Laskey of the Wellcome Center for Cancer and Molecular Biology. The center is a collaborative effort between the MRC and the medical charity, the Cancer Research Campaign.

In parallel with the government's decision to back biomedical research at the Research Council level, a new report released last month from the Centre for Policy Studies in Education at the University of Leeds, UK, shows that England's strengths in higher education, when compared across an international baseline, are also in the pre-clinical and biological sciences.

According to the study funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which aims to benchmark English university research competitiveness with that in American, Australian, Canadian, French, German and Japanese universities, England ranks second to the USA in the biological sciences. It ranks first in pharmacy and pharmacology. The report analyzes performance based on a combination of ISI journal citation factors and HEFCE's own Research Assessment Exercise rankings (Nature Med. 3, 133; 1997).

HEFCE funds research (annual budget, £824 million) and teaching (annual budget, £2,689 million) in over 100 universities and higher education institutes, and the results of the report are destined to add to the controversy among HEFCE's beneficiaries in the run-up to the next funding round in 2001.

Some universities will say that money should be concentrated in areas that demonstrate exceptional international standing, such as biomedical research, and that this reinforces the government's decision to favor this field within its Research Council budget. But others will argue that disciplines in which England's universities perform less well, such as engineering, should be better financed and brought up to the international benchmark.

Lead author of the report Jonathan Adams, Dean for Strategic Development at the University of Leeds, says that the analysis has revealed some interesting policy aspects: "In the preclinical sciences, which is an area of high performance for England, the work going on outside universities is perhaps of an even slightly higher standing, and that is a reflection of the success within England of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. This means that technology transfer between university and industry is working very well in this field."

However, the reverse seems to be true within the medical sciences field, which also has an overall second ranking to the USA. "Actually England total has a weaker standing than England universities. This suggests that there is a lot of medically related research going on outside university funding that is of poorer quality, and that raises some questions about NHS-funded R&D," says Adams.

A copy of the report, entitled Benchmarking of the International Standing of Research in England-A Consultancy Study on Bibliometric Analysis, is available at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/benchmark/BENCHMRK.PDF