Science and Technology Superpower (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, for her excellent chairmanship of this committee and the work we got through. I also thank the wonderful team behind her. I want to suggest first of all that one of the great risks to the Government is that they start to feel very self-congratulatory. I feel that the idea of the word “superpower” was disastrous. If you talk to average scientists working in laboratories, they were horrified at it because they felt that it was yet again an example of the British Government talking themselves up without any data.

One issue is that we need to have a serious review of our international standing, which would be quite informative. I remember that some years ago, when I was a member of the UKSRC, we spent a lot of time each month looking at that standing at regular stages and trying to work out where we were doing well and where we were doing badly and we reacted in consequence. I do not know whether that still goes on in government, but it is certainly not mentioned in the Nurse review.

We have been talking about pathways to impact for a long time. One problem with impact is just what the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said: innovation. We should forget about innovation. Innovation is a word that is so easily bandied around. What we are talking about is basic research, because it is the data that we get from basic research, not innovation, which really matters. The fact that we end up trying to suggest that we are going to change our economy with innovation because of the use of science in universities tends to be detrimental. I will come back to that in just a second.

The accent on financial value puts some academics off research. Indeed, I emphasise that the word “innovation” does not ring much with many people. In saying this, I declare my interest in a company called Startransfer, which is looking at some aspects of trying to change embryo culture. It is registered as a company, but nonetheless I still feel that the innovation side is really unimportant. It is the research that we are doing which will be important.

A key question that I want the Minister to answer is about the assessment of a project afterwards. When we talked to the people in charge of UKRI, they talked about the first 20% of grants being awarded. It would be very interesting to know whether those grants are tracked long term, what happens to them and whether they have the pathway to impact that they say they do in the application.

More importantly, I would argue that we are losing a lot of people in research. If 20% of our applications to UKRI are working, that means that 80% of scientists working in really good universities are not getting funded by a key body that is essential to their career. That is a very important consideration for the Government, and it seems to me that, unless we track what happens to the next 20%, the people who do not get a grant, we are failing in our duty to the whole situation.

I remember one of my colleagues who was working in my laboratory for a long time on splice sites, which was not very popular at the time, spending a year doing three different applications, none of which was successful. Eventually, he left without a research grant, and of course he has now retired early. Five or six years later, we are starting to see that the work that he was doing was really brilliant; it is now being recognised internationally, but of course it was never funded. That is important, too.

Finally, we need to be much more aware about UKRI. I did not think that we were doing this at all well, and we did not get the answers that we needed in the committee about researchers getting feedback from the organisation. When I was working in the United States, if you put in for a grant to the American equivalent for health research, you could phone up and get somebody to speak to who would give you some advice about how you might make your project more effective and successful as well as more topical and relevant to what the body was trying to do. We need to do that, and that goes with public engagement, which we have already been through in the previous debate.