Research priorities are confused

Sir, The longstanding Haldane principle by which the scientific community is given the right to choose how best to spend the public money invested in research has been under increasing pressures in recent years, perhaps an inevitable outcome of the much larger budgets of the past decade. The defensive tone of the joint letter by research council heads (June 11), and its timing within days of research and university funding being absorbed by the Business and Enterprise department, suggests that the battle is lost. How else are we to interpret “making discoveries” being sandwiched between the aims of “influencing government policy” and “collaborating with business”?

A more encouraging and valuable plea from the “independent” heads of our research councils would have been for a “budgetary stimulus” as recently granted to scientific and medical research in the US and Germany. Without that, the increasingly confused priorities of the UK research councils will only enhance the current disillusion in the science community and stimulate a new brain drain of some of our best young talent.