The SERC is among the largest public sponsors of academic research,
and, to its credit, its submission gave a very clear message. The message
is that all five research councils should surrender their freedom to fund
academic research which has no apparent application to wealth creation.
Instead, the research councils should become purchasers of research for
British industry, with the authority to buy this research from outside
the academic sector if necessary. Since the publication of the White Paper
in May, this policy for the industrial procurement of research has been
supported openly by civil servants at the SERC (Forum, 3 July).

It seems to make sense for public funding bodies to shop around for
their research: if someone can do it better and cheaper, then why not use
their services instead? This is music to the ears of the ministerial head
of the OST, William Waldegrave, who is known for his worship of market forces.
But why has the SERC converted to the same religion? After all this conversion
runs counter to the recommendations made to the OST by some of the big names
in British industry who, unlike university scientists, cannot be accused
of bias towards the academic science base. The answer is simple. The SERC
administration has failed to grasp the true connection between academic
research and commercial exploitation, running the risk of stifling the creativity
of academic science – the very creativity which everyone agrees is needed
for the future success of British industry.

The holes in the SERC’s policy show up in its willingness to replace
its subservience to the academic community with subservience to the industrial
community. By deciding to make industry, rather than academics, responsible
for its funding decisions, the SERC is accepting that academic science in
Britain is not producing ideas that are ripe for commercial exploitation.
This is, of course, nonsense. The past 40 years of scientific output from
British academe is littered with examples of exploitable ideas, many of
which have been developed by our industrial competitors. Britain’s real
problem is in pushing ideas through the developmental side of R&D.

In other countries this transfer of ideas is subsidised in its early
stages by the R&D contracts awarded to companies by industry ministries.
Instead, Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry is now axing its R&D
grants to industry, and is even closing its own research agencies. Faced
with this, the industrial scientists and technical managers who will soon
have the biggest say in the SERC’s funding decisions will find it hard to
resist the temptation to turn academic science into a wing of Britain’s
industrial R&D base. After all, British industry is not noted for its
record of investment in R&D, which is the lowest of all leading industrial
nations, and it would be silly to decline the opportunity to make up the
difference at no expense to the shareholder. If this happens, there will
be little hope for academic research proposals which show the kind of curiosity
and speculation that led Michael Faraday to his discoveries.

There is a danger that the SERC’s new policy will take this path. Consider
the following: the bulk of academic scientists submitting research proposals
to the research councils have long complained that funding decisions are
based on the judgments of research committees made up of a small selection
of senior academics with vested research interests to protect. Ben Martin
and John Irvine of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of
Sussex have described this process of academic peer review as being driven
by the ‘informed prejudices of a few wise men’. An important role of the
research council administrations in this process is to hold the ‘prejudices’
in check. Judging by the complaints against the SERC’s administration which
have appeared in the popular science press over the years, the career civil
servants at the SERC may not be doing a very good job. But will they be
any better at judging the prejudices of the industrial users with whom
they intend to populate all their committees? The question is vital, since
industrial scientists are more likely to play their cards close to their
chests than academics when it comes to discussing ‘strategic’ reasons for
funding this line of research rather than that one.

Having spent two recent years as an employee of the SERC, I am convinced
that it will be unable to cope with the dangerous forces which its new policy
is about to release on the academic science base. Again, consider the following:
the SERC, to be retitled the Engineering and Physical Sciences Council
as of 1 April 1994, was formed in 1965 out of the government’s Department
of Science and Industrial Research. As a result the SERC has, more than
any other research council, failed to shrug off the British civil service’s
principle of ‘administration by amateurs’. The administrators of the SERC,
many of whom have PhDs, are normally put in charge of research committees
covering areas of science or engineering far outside their expertise. The
rationale is that if the SERC administrators do not fully understand the
science being discussed, then they cannot unduly influence the funding and
policy decisions. For an organisation which has funded research into engineering
and the physical and astronomical sciences, the SERC is also staffed by
a frighteningly high proportion of former biologists, including the present
chairman, with the rest made up largely of arts graduates. All are permanent
employees who cannot be easily retired or transferred to make way for
different ‘blood’, while few have direct experience of industry or commerce.
Put all these factors together and you have a bureaucracy ill-equipped
to manage the new brand of scientific prejudices from the wise men and women
of industry.

Perhaps the monopoly shareholders of British industry, and not the
ordinary taxpayer, will yet become the masters of academic science. If
they do, British society will never realise the full economic dividends
of its investment in the academic science base.

David Ward is a research scientist and former employee of the SERC.
He now wears a grey suit and works as a scientific executive in the Manchester
area.

It is very telling that William Waldegrave, head of the new OST, refuses
to come clean on the reason for its establishment before publishing his
White Paper on the future organisation of British science. Either he and
his advisors simply do not know that they are in danger of destroying an
effective management system, or they realise that the government has finally
messed things up in the academic science base by starting to dismantle the
dual support mechanism.

Since at least the 1960s, Britain has funded research in its universities
under a dual support system whereby two distinct government sources provide
the money: currently, the research councils award funds to individual academics
for particular projects, and the Higher Education Funding Council gives
complementary block grants to their institutions to help them meet research
overheads, and to provide seed money for exploring new research avenues.
By providing the universities with this independent packet of research money,
the dual support mechanism gives them the means to pursue original and untried
ideas that research councils, with their unwieldy priorities and expectations
of exploitable results, are unlikely to support. Admittedly, over the past
10 years the degree of freedom offered by dual support has been limited
by the rise in research laboratories’ overheads and the need to divert HEFC
research support to fund teaching and other non-research activities. But
at least the mechanism for a creative approach remains.

When the then Department of Education and Science transferred 25 per
cent of HEFC’s research funds to the research councils earlier this year,
the move threatened to topple the mechanism for supporting creative research.
To make matters worse, the transfer occurred just when the research councils
were engrossed in judging academic research by its usefulness to technology,
and when universities were having to scrape every financial barrel to meet
government demands for a marked increase in student numbers. These situations
persist. If Waldegrave and his colleagues at the OST do not recognise the
consequences to Britain of dismantling the dual support mechanism in this
climate – let alone the consequences for academic research itself – they
might as well shut their office now.

The basic issue at stake is this: is research to be judged by its value
in generating new ideas for their own sakes, by the innovative application
of existing ideas to new technologies, or by some combination of both?
Whatever the answer, the productivity of research cannot increase unless
scientific originality is also fostered. Many academics and industrialists
have welcomed the OST in the hope that Waldegrave, with his place on the
Cabinet, will help to win new money for the science base. Certainly, nobody
would deny that an injection of cash is needed to fund some of the grant
proposals currently being turned down by the research councils, and to re-equip
ageing university laboratories. But this is not enough. Research productivity
boils down to a simple equation: research capacity multiplied by scientific
originality. Reduce the right-hand side of the equation towards zero and
very few scientific innovations will arise from academia to fuel technological
exports from UK Ltd.

What are the chances that the OST will choose to acknowledge the importance
of scientific originality? Very slim, if based on government mismanagement
of the research capacity side of the equation over the past 12 years. The
government’s objective during this period has been to ensure that academic
scientists commit more effort to exploitable research. This objective, which
is by no means indefensible, has been achieved in two ways. First, the research
councils have reduced the proportion of project funds awarded to individual
academics for basic, curiosity-driven research. And secondly, there has
been a move to give financial support for research to relatively few universities,
so increasing the scope for central government to control research priorities.

Research councils that set up money-hungry interdisciplinary research
centres also show this tendency to concentrate research capacity; a case
in point is the centre set up in Cambridge for research on superconductivity.
The matter was also articulated in the last open report of the Advisory
Board for the Research Councils, which recommended in no uncertain terms
that the HEFC’s support for research should be confined to just a few universities.
Most unsatisfactory is the fact that the relationship between the ABRC and
the OST remains shrouded in mystery.

Concentrating research capacity into fewer institutions may be the only
feasible course for ‘big’ sciences such as particle physics and astronomy,
with their enormous capital expenditures. However, most of the physical
and natural sciences, applied or pure, still do not fall into this category.
Here, the concentration of research capacity into a few universities will
severely limit the number of British academics able to conduct research.
This can only stifle the generation of original ideas in the rest of the
academic science base. The result, not surprisingly, is even less originality
in the science base and especially in those disciplines that have repeatedly
proved that innovative and exploitable ideas often arise in small departments
in small universities. Moreover, these disciplines and their representative
departments are also the ones that provide the majority of research-trained
manpower to British industry.

The OST has clearly inherited a funding policy that suppresses scientific
creativity by limiting the types of research project for which funding is
available, and by denying that successful research departments can thrive
in otherwise mediocre universities. To persist with this policy would be
like imitating the amateur gardener who cuts down his smallest rose bush
just as it is about to produce prize-winning blooms. Don’t be an amateur,
Mr Waldegrave; recent events have shown that there are already enough
of them in government.

David Ward is a former researcher turned scientific administrator. He
is based in Manchester.