A Nobel laureate has criticised the Medical Research Council (MRC)’s plans to phase out long-term funding for its well-established units, arguing this type of “top-down” and “dirigiste” planning of research will be a “disaster” for curiosity-led science.
John Walker, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997 for his pioneering work on enzymes, told?糖心Vlog?that he was extremely concerned by the loss of MRC units, many of which are due to close in the next few years as the council rolls out a new funding model.
Under the arrangements, awards for new “Centres of Research Excellence”?will fund research teams for up to 14 years at a time – compared?with five years under the old unit model – but funding is capped at ?3 million a year, down from a maximum of ?10 million a year.
New MRC core grants will fund only up to 30?per cent of the salaries of the unit’s principal investigators and leadership team “in?line with their research contribution”, while support for PhD studentships will be limited to two a?year. That has led to fears that some scientists, technicians and administrative staff at units will be made redundant even if they are successful in winning Centre of Research Excellence funding.
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Walker, who is emeritus director of the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit which he ran between 1997 and 2013 when it was known as the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, based at the University of Cambridge, said he was unimpressed by the new system, saying it would be a “disaster” for curiosity-led research.
“Cambridge had five or six units that will disappear in the next few years – the system put in its place is, by no means, an adequate substitute for the support we’ve had for long-term research,” he said.
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Reducing support for primary investigators was a mistake, continued Walker, who spoke to THE at the annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in southern Germany, which brings together Nobel prizewinners and early career scientists.
“We are no longer supporting the primary investigators in the same way but also we are removing support for support scientists, and allowing them to have a career,” said Walker, who was based for many years at the MRC’s famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), often referred to as Britain’s “Nobel Factory”.
On the loss of funding for more support scientists, he explained: “I had some people who worked with me on their PhDs, and stayed with me for 20 or 30 years. Not everyone has the qualities to lead a research group – but might be extremely gifted experimentalists, and they fitted very well into our model which encouraged curiosity-led research. That is all disappearing – it’s a disaster.”
The new MRC funding model – first reported by THE in?March 2023?– has previously been defended by science minister Patrick Vallance and the MRC’s executive chair Patrick Chinnery.
Writing in?THE?in December, Chinnery?claimed?units that make the “transition [to the Centres of Research Excellence model] will enjoy the advantages of a reduced bureaucratic burden on research teams and long-term financial security” given funding periods will now last up to 14 years.
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But Walker’s comments mirror other criticisms of the plan. Earlier this year, two other Nobelists, chemist Venki Ramakrishnan and recent physics winner Geoffrey Hinton, signed a University and College Union-organised letter urging a rethink, while the closures affecting units across multiple UK universities have also been raised in the House of Lords.
Walker, who worked alongside DNA pioneer Francis Crick and double Nobelist Fred Sanger at the LMB, said the changes embodied what he believed was “too much top-down management of science which has led to many fewer opportunities for brilliant scientists to operate in the way they want”.
“History suggests this is really the best way to produce outstanding science. No one told Greg Winter to look into monoclonal antibodies or told Fred Sanger to do DNA sequencing,” he said, referring to two Nobel prizewinning scientists whose work led to some of the world’s best-selling pharmaceutical treatments.
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“What we are seeing is an extremely dirigiste approach to science at the moment, with people at the top telling scientists what to do,” said Walker.
An MRC spokesperson said the new model will?“continue to provide long-term support for ambitious and important biomedical science” and “tackle challenges that will have major impact on human health and economic growth”.
A breadth of research will be supported, the spokesperson added,?“spanning biomedical and health research from basic discovery science through to translational and more applied research” and?“each challenge is defined by the research team, and not centrally by MRC”.
Curiosity-driven work from the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit will transfer to the new?MRC Centre of Research Excellence for Restorative Neural Dynamics - one of three announced so far.
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