Wellcome Trust joins calls opposing MRC budget shift

The leaders of the Wellcome Trust, Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Association of Medical Research Charities have voiced concerns that the UK's well-balanced medical research would be threatened by a rumoured plan to move Medical Research Council funding to the Department of Health.

"A decision to transfer responsibility for medical research from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to the Department of Health would be a profound change with far-reaching consequences," said Ted Bianco, acting director of the Wellcome Trust, in a statement, saying that such a change "should not be undertaken for the sake of short-term budget management."

He added that the trust believes such a move "would be ill-advised and potentially damaging to a stable science funding system that works well," saying that it would "risk changing the very nature of medical research in the UK, impairing opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaborations with other fields of sciences and engineering, and shifting the balance from fundamental to applied research."