Over 600 signatories, including two Nobel prize winners & Astronomer Royal, demand Medical Research Council halts funding changes
21 January 2025
Nobel prize winners, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan and Professor Geoffrey Hinton, as well as the Astronomer Royal, Professor Lord Martin Rees, have joined over 600 other signatories to an open letter demanding the Medical Research Council (MRC) revisits funding changes that could lead to the closure of highly successful research units.
Other signatories include public intellectual and Harvard professor Steven Pinker and former president of the Royal Statistical Society David Spiegelhalter, alongside nearly 70 other national academy fellows, 110 professors and more than 300 other academics, researchers, and support staff from the UK and abroad.
The letter, addressed to science minister Lord Patrick Vallance and shared with Patrick Chinnery and Keir Starmer, is in response to the MRC's new funding model, which will eliminate direct sustained investment in the existing internationally renowned research units. In its place, smaller grants directed towards Centres of Research Excellence (CoRES) will be offered competitively, which any research organisation can apply for [NOTE 1].
The proposed changes have raised widespread concern on several fronts, prompting a debate in the House of Lords.
The signatories' concerns include that:
The full impact of the new funding model has been underestimated, as MRC units are unique scientific assets with international prominence and losing them will detrimentally affect the entire UK medical research sector.
- The process behind the decision to change the funding model was not transparent, and no stakeholders were consulted before the decision was taken, and there was no governmental or Parliamentary scrutiny of the decision.
The change of funding model is placing thousands of highly skilled scientists and staff at risk of redundancy.
The letter says 'it would be a tragedy for medical research in the UK if the MRC units were lost simply because of a sense of inevitability, or a reluctance to revisit previous decisions' and calls on the government to pause the funding changes until the signatories' concerns have been addressed.
The MRC proposed the move to CoRE funding as part of an initiative to fund challenge-led science, but many believe that this could be implemented while maintaining stable long-term scientific investment in units. The units have been around for a long time precisely because they represent a successful model for collaborative, cross-disciplinary science, and have adapted successfully to changing scientific demands many times in the past.
UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: 'The decision to change the funding model was made behind closed doors by a previous MRC leadership. As evidenced by the hundreds of signatories to our letter, the academic community vehemently opposes the changes and Lord Vallance and Patrick Chinnery now need to listen to those impacted to ensure that there is a proper debate about the impact of the changes and consider an alternative that preserve these national assets. Failing to do so risks irreparable damage to crucial medical research programmes.'
Notes
[1] All three units that have applied for the new CoRE funding so far have been unsuccessful. The Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow will close later this year, and currently 80 staff are at risk of redundancy.
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