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The Medical Research Council came under heavy fire this week for abandoning
top-rated work simply because it lies outside the council’s rigidly defined
objectives. The criticism came from David Pegg whose Medical Cryobiology
Group at Cambridge had to be disbanded when the council withdrew its support
last year.

Pegg’s work on ways of preserving tissues and organs for transplantation
surgery was reprieved in June by a grant from the Wellcome Trust. Wellcome
awarded Pegg and two colleagues £400 000 to continue their work at
the University of York.

‘Wellcome seems to work by judging things on merit. The MRC works out
its policy first, and then it does not fund anything that does not fit in
with that policy, no matter how good it is,’ said Pegg. He pointed out that
molecular biology and molecular genetics now share a large proportion of
the council’s budget.

‘But molecular biology would not have been funded if today’s criteria
for funding were in place before the field took off,’ said Pegg. ‘The council
now has different targets and demands specific achievements by specific
times, but science doesn’t work that way.’ Pegg called for the MRC’s policies
to be examined ‘critically and in public’.