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Strong words on the future of British science from some of the government’s
most influential advisers have landed on the desk of minister William Waldegrave
as he prepares his White Paper on science. In two reports published last
week, the Advisory Council on Science and Technology and the Advisory Board
for the Research Councils both argue for some of the most dramatic changes
to the organisation of research in over 20 years – but the changes they
want are very different.

ACOST tells the science minister to scrap most of the current arrangements
for research and start again. It says Britain’s five research councils,
based on traditional scientific disciplines and spending £1 billion
a year, should be abolished. In their place should be a single council to
fund pure research, such as astronomy, and a separate council for applied
research, such as the search for a cure for AIDS.

Both new councils should confine themselves strictly to funding, rather
than doing, research, says ACOST. The research institutes run by the existing
councils and government departments should be given independence.

ACOST also recommends that control of £800 million of university
research spending should be transferred from the Department for Education
to Waldegrave’s Office of Science and Technology. And coordination of over
£1 billion spent by government departments on research should be improved
through the OST.

Graham Hills, a member of ACOST, says radical reform is needed to correct
historic weaknesses. ‘The current system has failed Britain for over 50
years by turning out a nation that is immensely intelligent, but incompetent,’
says Hills. ‘The question is what does Britain need – and that is not the
same as saying what would the scientists like to do.’

ACOST is billing its proposals as ‘Rothschild revisited’, arguing that
the 1971 White Paper on science drawn up by Victor Rothschild was correct
to say there should be a clear distinction between those who pay for research,
such as government departments, and those who do it, such as research institutes.
The problem, the council believes, is that the implementation of the Rothschild
report was fudged. The ABRC disagrees.

David Phillips, chairman of the ABRC, says ACOST’s plan to separate
research institutes from the research councils is ‘doctrinaire’. In the
ABRC’s experience, close links with institutes improve research, he says.

The ABRC also vehemently opposes ACOST’s plans for pure research. ‘To
put curiosity research in a separate pocket seems to be nonsense,’ says
Phillips.

The ABRC argues for the existing five research councils to be replaced
by six new councils covering biology, the geosphere, physical and engineering
sciences, astronomy and particle physics, medicine, and social sciences
and the humanities. Their primary purpose should be to support science that
will improve Britain’s economy and the quality of life.

Both ACOST and the ABRC argue for a change in the government’s stubborn
opposition to funding near-market research. ACOST says the policy has been
counter-productive.

The Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology, an independent
think-tank funded by government and industry, is recommending that an Industry
Technology Council should manage the entire science and technology budget.

The CEST says that the technology council would be an independent company.
It would seek to ensure that a portfolio of projects is supported, ‘ranging
from the strategic and close-to-exploitation, to the more basic or fundamental,
curiosity-driven work’.