It could be Game Over for UK science within days

A week ago, we had the FT story saying the government was planning cuts of £960 million in research. Then Martin Rees said at the press conference on Friday that the gap between a good and bad outcome for the spending review was about £1 billion. These are cuts of around 20 per cent, the level at which the Royal Society has warned the government it would be "Game Over" for Britain's position as a leading scientific nation.

And I’m now told that the decision on the BIS budget could be taken as early as this week. It’s time to face it. Irrational it may be, but in the coming days we really are staring into the barrel of the deepest cuts in science spending ever contemplated by any British government - cuts that for an entire generation of scientists, for Britain's hopes for a hi-tech economic future really do mean Game Over.

Comments

[Al Dove]

What a disaster. Ben Goldacre is talking about a Brain Drain, or exodus of the best scientific minds. It takes an awfully long time to pull yourself out of that kind of hole. At a time when the US and Europe face ever stiffer competition from a scientific ascendancy in Asia, a decision like this could really put the UK in a scientific backwater. Here's hoping sanity prevails...

[William Cullerne Bown]

Yes, cuts on this scale will certainly cause Britain to lose a lot of talent.

[Cyril Anand]

It would be sad to see British scientific research suffer as we have some great minds in this country. I used to work for the ONS compiling GDP by output. Despite proposing ideas which would boost GDP, reduce waste and assist technological "push" I was forced to leave. It seems you can only have good ideas if you reach a certain rank. The old maxim of "If you want to know how a hotel works ask the janitor" certainly applies. In my case I saw causal links and interdependencies in the "Input-Output" matrix but was silenced.

[Nearly Burnt Out]

The brain drain isn't necessarily to abroad, either. I imagine there's many more who, like me, are already overworked and fear that cuts to university budgets will be passed on to staff in the form of increased workloads. You can make staff redundant in pretty short order, but it takes longer to dismantle a course that students are taking and the teaching remains, to be done by fewer people. Even if my own job is safe, if some of my colleagues go, how can the result not be to increase workloads? It wouldn't take much for my workload to be beyond what I can bear. An outside job, a job which pays me reasonably for the hours I do and doesn't require me to work more than 40 hours per week on average, such a job begins to look very attractive.

[William Cullerne Bown]

@Nearly Burnt Out - I agree. People will look at their options. But it's not even as simple as you suggest I don't think. Yes, you can make people redundant, but you have to find the redundancy payments from somewhere, and these bills can quickly add up...

[Matt]

I'm a physics undergrad in Britian, and I'm doing something that was unimaginable when I first started: I am considering leaving the country for my PhD work, simply put there's no salary for me here, my tutor (a researcher) has told me his allowed intake of grad students for his reserch group has dropped from 15 per year to 5 for 2011/12. The only chance I have of getting work is if a university cuts grad student allowances to near minimum wage, I'm sorry, I'm not sitting through 4 years of "Quantum Electrodynamics" to be paid that, especially since other students in my class not doing a graduate degree go to work in the financial sector and will be on thirty grand before I can call myself "Doctor"

[William Cullerne Bown]

Matt, I'm so sorry to hear that. The uncertainty and gloom must be unnerving. It's specially difficult in physics at the moment, what with all the problems at STFC. And this is such an important time for you and others who are graduating now. You have to do what's right for you.

[Game Room Expert]

You never know what the British Government is going to do. Say, where can you read more about the conference?

Thanks

[Pension Funds Ireland]

Funds are always be beneficial for meeting the future demands.