Hands off our boffins!

I didn't realise...

I didn't realise that we spent as much as £3.5bn on Science in this country. You might say it's not a lot but when the Tories are talking of needing to cut £6bn from the education budget per year then it puts it into some sort of perspective.

Guided by DBIS?

Guided by DBIS? I'm suprised Mandelson hasn't mandated their money go into research on how best to filter money from the tax payer into his music buddy's pockets or something.

Especially as there's nothing Mandelson would like more than to mandate, man-date, get it? Okay, that was bad.

shortsighted and venal

Um, I thought we were talking about the government here - isn't that a tad redundant ?

Imagine if...

As part of paying taxes, we got to decide where those taxes were spent. As a kind of privilege for those few of us that arent on the dole, we get to decide where the money goes.

I would spend 20% of my taxes on the NHS, 20% on education, 10% on police, 0% on paying bureaucrats, and 50% on further investment in science.

Sigh - missing the point about research

So many of the technologies that we now take for granted have come about through pure blue-sky research which didn't set out with a concrete aim, but with the target of understanding more about the world.

If all you do is fund research into using what we already know, then you will be at a severe disadvantage to other nations who are doing pure research. When they discover the next big thing guess who is going to best able to make the most of it? It won't be us, we'll still be working on the last big thing and won't have anyone able to work on the new stuff.

The reason we are so big in bio-tech is partly because there are many UK based research groups doing the blue-sky pure research, who are then able to feed this knowledge into the commercial stuff. Without that we'd be dependent of other people to come up with the new stuff in order to follow them.

This is something the US has generally understood. A lot of their research, like that conducted by DARPA is very long-sighted, has few real short term gains, but means they can make the most of it fifteen years down the line when some of the whackier ideas suddenly become feasible.

Once again, short sighted politicians and business types are selling the future for short term gains and a few shiny gadgets.

Colour me surprised.

Useless thinking

"there are cosmologists doing really great inquiry into the origins of the universe. That doesn't have any real benefit to the economy"...

Or people 80years ago thinking about how electrons could be waves. I mean, what use is a material that only semi-conducts electricity?

Speaking as one of the afore-mentioned boffins

The question you have to ask DBIS is this: how many boffins do you expect to leave the UK in search of better prospects?

We put up with the low pay, and the petty bureaucracy, in return for sufficient funding to do something interesting and then tell others about it. We build up networks of friends around the globe. And, if conditions become uncomfortable, we are highly mobile.

So, for computing: Seattle, the Bay Area, or Sophia Antipolis vs Manchester? Right now, what holds me back are worries about health insurance and the doubtful nature of my rusty French. If either country has the foresight to make me an offer, I'm interested.

All it would take to wreck UK Science and Engineering is for politicians in another part of the world to make us an offer we can't refuse. An interesting ploy for the USA, at the right time, would be to make a blanket offer to consider all UK scientists in disciplines of interest, short-circuiting current immigration red-tape. For France the immigration status is even easier to sort out, and the climate in Nice is attractive. So to the French minister I say: "Give me a modest salary, and the research funding I need, and I'll move tomorrow."

And besides, buying up another countries scientists is probably the cheapest way to undermine it's viability.

(And if you want an example of how to do science in a recession look at the Alvey Project in the early 1980s. The UK CS scene was transformed by this, and ARM is only the most significant of the many productive companies resulting from that decision.)

What has David Willetts got to say?

Hopeless?

"The question you have to ask DBIS is this: how many boffins do you expect to leave the UK in search of better prospects?"

I doubt they care....thats part of the problem. The only hope really is things become more sensible once the tories get in power, but I suspect they will cut the science budget anyway as part of general cutbacks....

So this postdoc will be giving up on science in the near future - it just doesnt seem to be a viable career path with all these funding cuts being implemented seemingly year after year (its only 1 year since the last stfc funding crisis that lost a lot of people their jobs!).

driving with myopy risks hitting a wall

Looks like someone here doesn't get how research works. You start with a bunch of pure research projects; an unpredictable fraction of these eventually result in applications. Then you can start a cycle of refinement of said applications; eventually, they are perfected enough to be commercially profitable. If you cut out the pure research at the top, the whole thing is doomed to stop eventually.

Cutting funds to pure research in order to save money is like turning off your car's engine to save fuel. Sure, you'll keep running on inertia for a while, and spend no money while doing so, but only an idiot would consider this a good plan.

Besides, as David Lester pointed above, scientists are more mobile than ever - they have friends around the world, travel a lot, know multiple languages. Keep this up, and you'll start hurting for competent applied researchers too.

@how many boffins do you expect to leave the UK in search of better prospects?

... well, it is unlikely to matter.

Firstly, not all boffins are mobile -- they often have partners, children, and houses which make them less mobile.

Secondly, despite how self-important many of these boffins are, they mostly squat on top of a vast array of (supposedly) more junior boffins (e.g. postdocs), a fair fraction of whom are just as boffinacious as their boss; and would (and could) easily replace that boss when he or she demonstrated their "mobility" and f**ked off to France.

Thirdly, the UK could just import boffins of a suitable standard from overseas [1].

What counts is the resources available to UK based boffinry. So feel free to throw your little hissy fit and sod-off, boss-boffins -- there are plenty of under-boffins and xeno-boffins just waiting for you to clear your desk, ... and it wouldn't surprise me if they were better than you anyway. And take your exclusive little "network" away with you, because the new lot can bootstrap their own petty little cliques, and even their own valuable cross-disciplinary collaborations.

[1] Oh wait, they already are importing them, and have been for quite some time.

@AC 14:50

Well unfortunately you're both right and wrong - many of the boss-boffins are less mobile due to partners/children/houses as you say... and that's just one of the reasons why its the under-boffins/postdocs who will go overseas to get jobs, and who knows, maybe settle and have families over there, leaving a load of lecturers in the UK with jobs for life but no research or researchers..

@how many boffins do you expect to leave the UK in search of better prospects?

Dear AC (14.50GMT),

I thought I might get a reply of that nature. ;-)

We are in complete agreement: what matters is the resources available to "UK based boffinry". And by that I mean PhD grants and money for post docs. If it's taken away, then there's not much point in my under-boffins or any xeno-boffins replacing me is there? They'd also be better off elsewhere. Don't forget that in today's world, my under-boffins are not UK nationals. As for getting UK nationals as PhD students....

And by taking away the PhD grants, the primary mechanism for finding your overseas boffins (for subsequent use in UK industry) is also removed. But you knew that, didn't you?

under/xeno-boffins, also better off elesewhere?

Not necessarily. Any given postdoc-boffin, for example, would be better off as a permanent lecturer-boffin, than in their current position living on short-term money. All this "postdoc money" does (has done) is casualize the research base; and that casualization (ie economic uncertainty) makes the researchers less efficient compared to a comparable number of (nominally) permanent positions.

Of course, any recently promoted-to-lecturer-boffin might subsequently want to be better off still ... but they're nevertheless better off than they were. And as long as the supply of under-funded talent exceeds resources, the petulant "I'm going to walk out" line carries little weight.

And _your_ under-boffins might not be UK nationals, but where I am plenty of them are. Further xeno-boffins are frequently imported as lecturer- and prof-boffs, they aren't just PhD students.

AC1450

ringfenced? bollocks, see

see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6475801.stm

para 4: "The announcement will give cheer to the research community which has been angered by a recent claw-back of £98m in funding to cover cost overruns at the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry)."

Economic benefits & Blue Sky research

The snag with Blue Sky research is that the economic benefits don't necessarily benefit those that paid for the original research - the benefits tend to go to whichever companies are first to find an application and patent it. Companies in the US and the Far East have shown themselves to be quite adept at beating their counterparts in the UK.

Now that there is a huge deficit in the UK and numerous problems that need to addressed, research that may or may not provide some useful benefits at sometime on the future is unlikely to come high on the list of priorities.