Chief executive says budget decision is government’s to make
The Medical Research Council will turn 100 on 20 June, but the council’s future will remain in question until the government’s spending review is published six days later.
Speaking to Research Fortnight, MRC’s chief executive John Savill confirmed that the council was involved in discussions about its funding, but emphasised that the final decision ultimately rested with Whitehall, not Swindon.
“They supported us very strongly in the last spending review, we got a very good settlement, let’s see what happens,” he says.
But others have expressed concerns that moving the MRC from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to the Department of Health would threaten independent decision-making, interdisciplinary research and protected research spending at the MRC.
Describing the proposed move as a “fudge” that is being pushed forward by the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, Phil Willis, chairman of the Association of Medical Research Charities, says that, while the MRC would begin as a distinct entity within the NHS, “at any one time, the attraction of actually merging the National Institute for Health Research and the MRC will be, I think, too attractive to resist.”
Even without a merger, the MRC’s independence is under threat, he argues. “My worry is once it becomes part of a department [that] has political direction, you lose the Haldane principle,” comments Willis.
“The sustention of the Haldane principle—being informed by our pressing health and societal needs, but nonetheless supporting the best people through a very rigorous peer review process, guided by where the opportunities lie, rather than by any top-down direction—is critically important,” adds John Tooke, president of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Aside from the budget speculation, the MRC is undergoing changes that will leave it looking considerably different, should it survive. It is in the process of transferring two-thirds of its units to universities, and is closing down the Mill Hill site that has been home to the National Institute for Medical Research since 1950.
“When the MRC set up its units 50 years ago, by and large the medical schools weren’t very attuned to research, so the MRC had to set up its own centres of excellence,” says Savill. “But in the past 20 years, our UK universities have become world leading in the biomedical sciences, so the MRC should now partner them.”
University College London is incorporating three MRC units. Tooke, who is vice-provost for health at UCL, denies that the transfers are merely about allowing universities to add top researchers to their books ahead of the Research Excellence Framework.
“We wouldn’t do it for that purpose,” says Tooke, who says he believes scientists at transferred units will benefit from the perspectives of those working in other disciplines.
Discussing the closure of the NIMR, Savill is keen to downplay staff losses ahead of moving those that remain to the Francis Crick Institute in 2015, saying that there has in fact been a spate of hiring.
Savill says that in recent years, around 15 young group leaders have joined the NIMR, with the expectation that they will be moving to the Crick Institute.
Ahead of the council’s centenary on 20 June, supporters of the MRC have been fulsome in their praise of its independence, its commitment to fundamental science and its role working with charities, industry and the other research councils.
“Those principles of independence and being the taxpayer’s investment [in science for health] really have stood us in good store over the last hundred years,” comments Savill.
“The MRC has been a robust, very dynamic organisation for a hundred years and I really hope it goes forward in a similar format for another hundred,” he says.