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Proposals to separate the funding of Britain’s basic and applied research
are ‘naive and wrongly founded’, says the head of the Medical Research Council.
The proposals, submitted by the Advisory Council on Science and Technology
to the science minister William Waldegrave as he prepares the White Paper
on science, have already provoked predictable wrath elsewhere.

ACOST wants the research councils abolished and two separate new bodies
to oversee public funding of ‘mission-oriented’ and ‘curiosity-driven’ research.
Research institutes and units should be privatised, says ACOST. But Dai
Rees, head of the MRC, believes the ideas suffer from a long-standing national
problem, short-termism. ‘We regard the integration of basic and clinical
work as absolutely vital to our mission,’ he said.

Rees was speaking at the launch of the MRC’s annual report this week.
He said that privatised units competing with each other would have to employ
‘armies of administrators, PR people and marketing experts to ensure they
can survive’. He claimed that even Nobel prizewinners ‘would have to spend
so much of their time as travelling salesmen that they would have no time
to do any science’. The MRC is submitting its own proposals to Waldegrave.