Science and Technology: Economy
Lord Winston Excerpts(3 weeks ago)
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Lord Winston (Lab)
My Lords, in 2023, Sir Paul Nurse reported on how best we might keep Britain’s scientific research world-leading. One excellent example he chose to identify in his report was the role of the Medical Research Council’s so-called research units. Sir Paul’s report made it very clear how vital these were and how they must be supported to maintain our scientific expertise in healthcare and so on. These 20 units are scattered around the country and most are associated with universities—Oxford, Cambridge, Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and certainly UCL in London. These units are truly world-class and are recognised worldwide as being absolutely outstanding but threatened. One such is the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge, which I first visited about 20 years ago and was deeply impressed with what they were doing there. It has an 80-year history of cognition and brain science and its remit includes mental health; it focuses on the current global mental health problems, developmental disorders, stroke, dementia, and the nature of human consciousness.
People at the unit tell me that they do not think they can survive on the funding that is now being offered to them as the MRC has changed its funding plan, as we heard on Monday from my noble friend Lord Vallance when he answered my Question. I am sorry that I have not actually warned him of my speech in advance but, of course, I have been besieged by phone calls all day from different research units across the country that are seriously and deeply concerned about this problem. They think that they cannot survive. The Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit is one of six units in Cambridge that would have to be supported by the university if the MRC ceased the full funding that it currently has. The university has certainly not agreed to fund it—as, indeed, as far as I am aware, no university has agreed to fund any of the host units.
I will refer briefly to another unit that I think is particularly interesting: the Prion Unit in London. That one, of course, is famous for its work on mad cow disease, and how that particular dementia was a result of a protein that could affect the brain and fatally change its other proteins. At a recent meeting in China only a few weeks ago, members of the Prion Unit in London were greeted as the world leaders in this, feted all over, particularly at the main Chinese meeting, and the Chinese are now pouring millions into this research—for what reason I am not sure, but certainly these prions are going to come back. There are lots of species that look as though they could be vulnerable, and certainly the risk of mutation in animal species, perhaps in America, could really recur, and this would produce a massive disaster. The Prion Unit still has a very important role to play.
In answer to my Question on Monday, we heard from my noble friend Lord Vallance, the Minister of State, that the MRC had decided to change the funding model in such a way that the units are now expected to reapply for continued funding for a maximum of 14 years, with a review halfway through, after seven years. It is proposed that the host university funds the principal investigators up to 80% of their salary and the on-costs, and the surviving units will be limited to £3 million per annum. That is quite inadequate to maintain what they are doing: it is probably about one-quarter of what they actually need for their current expenses. Of course, many of these units are lab-based and therefore much more expensive.
I listened to my noble friend Lord Vallance very carefully on Monday when he answered my Question. I was extremely grateful for his care in taking up so much of his time to explain the current position, and also for speaking to me outside the Chamber on various occasions. Ultimately, I do not think that the format of an Oral Question could possibly give him anything like enough time or scope to address the concerns that the scientific community and the employees have about these units. They are certainly worried about their jobs: it is likely to affect up to 200 professors, perhaps, and around 2,100 scientists, which is of major concern.
Of course, my noble friend Lord Vallance was absolutely right to express the need for response-mode funding as an alternative but, unfortunately, as Paul Nurse pointed out, these units are truly unique in so many ways and losing their research output, training and maintaining of technical expertise will be extremely serious. Does my noble friend the Minister accept that the way the research councils have been set up means that we cannot interfere with their decisions on money? But we should indeed have some consciousness about their strategy and this is certainly where politicians have a right to decide. Of course, we all hope that my noble friend the Minister might find a better solution to a crisis which is adversely affecting UK science and those who contribute most effectively towards its success and its continued financial income.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
My Lords, I respectfully remind noble Lords that the speaking time limit is four minutes. I urge all noble Lords to keep within that so that the debate may be concluded within the time allowed without the Minister having to cut short his response.
Specialised Research Units: Closures
Lord Winston Excerpts(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Lord Winston
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Medical Research Council’s plans to close certain specialised research units; and of the implications of those plans for affected scientists.
The Minister of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Lord Vallance of Balham) (Lab)
The Medical Research Council is changing how it supports research across its units and centres following a review of its funding models. The new MRC centres of research excellence model will improve how we bring together the best science, skills and leadership to focus on key challenges in medical research. All existing units can apply for funding through this new model, or transition to other models of MRC grant funding.
Lord Winston (Lab)
I am very grateful to the Minister for answering my Question and I am pleased to hear that he supports the notion of these specialised units. Does he agree, too, that these units are particularly important in the study of relatively uncommon diseases, often with a very high profile, and are extremely unique? They all have an international reputation and have produced a number of Nobel Prize winners. Is it not possible that the current review, having received successful grant money from the MRC, might destabilise these units, and we would end up losing scientists who may be forced to go to other places? Does he feel there is something we can do about that?
Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a very important point. In the transition to this new model, all the existing units will be able to apply to the new model and there will be transition arrangements for those staff who do not become part of the new model and return to funding from the host institution or through grant funding. He is right that there will be specific centres with some role in global resilience, or another bespoke reason to keep them going, that will be looked at as special cases as part of this process.
Horizon Europe
Lord Winston Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Viscount Camrose (Con)
Yes, indeed. I very much recognise the value of the Horizon programme. Of course, any Horizon programme beyond the current one does not exist yet, except conceptually in the minds of all the current participants, but obviously we would look very favourably at participating as and when its terms were made clear.
Lord Winston (Lab)
My Lords, until Brexit, it was clear that the United Kingdom was second only to the United States in research in science, engineering and medicine. Can the Minister be kind enough to tell the House what assessment the Government have made of the impact of the loss of the Horizon programme in terms of citations and publications?
Viscount Camrose (Con)
As I have said in this House before, there is no doubt that our period of non-association with the Horizon programme did lasting damage. We have to focus now on repairing that damage. It is very difficult to put a number in currency on the value of that and I am not sure I would know where to begin. I absolutely acknowledge that the damage was real and is going to take a very conscious effort to fix.
Science and Technology Superpower (Science and Technology Committee Report)
Lord Winston Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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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.