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THE counting season is well and truly under way. Hot on the heels of
a report from the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology
on ‘Definitions of R&D’ (This Week, 28 April) comes a series of studies
from an academic team of tea-leaf readers. The latest analysis of the R&D
statistics comes from the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex
University.

Newspaper reports of this work underline the shortcomings of ‘numerological’
techniques that depend on doing little more than counting pounds spent and
the number of people involved in spending them. Last week’s newspaper reports
highlighted the fact that Britain’s scientists were ‘Pounds sterling 300
million a year worse off than their European counterparts’. And yet the
source of these articles clearly shows that the government has increased
its spending on university research, the main focus of the work.

The SPRU study, at least the version that appears in book form (Investing
in the Future, by John Irvine, Ben R. Martin and Pheobe A. Isard, published
by Edward Elgar Publishing at Pounds sterling 35), points out that ‘total
expenditure rose in real terms by just over 15 per cent in the period from
1975 to reach a figure of Pounds sterling 1620 million in 1987′. There was
a Labour government during some of this period, but ‘the rate of growth
has varied little over time’, which leads the report’s authors to conclude
that ‘there appears to be no empirical basis for the commonly voiced belief
among the academic research community that the Conservative government under
Mrs Thatcher has been any less generous than previous Labour administrations.
Indeed, spending increased by 12 per cent during the five-year period 1982-87
compared with level funding between 1975 and 1980.’

The newspapers did not make up the figure of Pounds sterling 300 million,
or $500 million as the report puts it. The SPRU report says that it would
take that much to bring Britain in line with the rest of Europe. But that
was 1987: the report points out that since then ‘the situation may well
have been improved by increases in the Science Vote announced by the government
in 1988 and 1989′.

Perhaps not wanting to allow the government too much credit, the team
from SPRU goes on to warn that ‘any judgment in this matter would need to
take into account the budgetary growth that has occurred in France and,
to a lesser extent, West Germany over the same period’. Well, let us have
some judgments: has Britain caught up or hasn’t it? Surely it isn’t beyond
the ability of this experienced team of number crunchers to look at the
budgets of the countries concerned. After all, the British government publishes
an annual review of its R&D spending; and that review provides forecasts
of what the government expects to spend over the next few years. The latest
such report clearly shows that the increases in the Science Vote have reached
a peak and ‘stability’ is on the way.

There are other questions about the apparent poverty of British research
in comparison with its competitors. The figure is actually for ‘academic
related research’. It is pretty obvious from the report’s own analysis that
this isn’t the only yardstick when it comes to assessing a country’s technical
health, for there is one nation that is further down the league table than
Britain. That is Japan. The figure needed to bring Japan into line with
‘European’ levels makes the British government look spendthrift. It would
take no less than $3.5 billion, or, to put it another way ‘a virtual doubling
of the funds allocated in 1987′.

What all this shows us is that number crunching isn’t the be-all and
end-all of analysis. Fortunately, the report from the House of Lords pointed
this out rather more graphically and elegantly. (It is sometimes surprising
to find the ‘amateurs’ in the upper house wiping the floor with professional
academics when it comes to presenting a case in an easily comprehensible
way, but perhaps the noble peers are helped by not having to worry about
the stuffy conventions of academia, where readability is almost a crime.)
The SPRU report does point to a relative shortcoming in Britain when it
comes to the biological sciences; but some of this weakness is because this
country has not pumped so much money into agricultural research, possibly
a wise move given the farm surpluses of recent years. And what is the point
of trying to compete with the United States, which spends more on the life
sciences than France and Germany together spend on all scientific disciplines?
Perhaps the point of this exercise is to get someone to take the numbers
game more seriously. The final sentence of the report may say it all: ‘The
fact that spending on academic research is coming to be seen more and more
as an essential investment in the future gives us reason to believe that
steps will soon be taken to improve the quality of international statistics
which are so essential for science-policy making.’ It isn’t easy to argue:
the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology said the same
thing. It is, though, easier to argue with the use that policy analysts
(and journalists) should make of the numbers.

The researchers from SPRU tell us: ‘Like most academics in the science-policy
field, we would much prefer to devote our efforts to analysing and interpreting
figures rather than to the task of producing primary data-series!’ Perhaps
there have to be people who spend their time poring over endless tables
rather than watching the game; but it would be far more valuable to try
to gain some insights into what it all means for science.