Clipped wings can’t fly

Funding crises can seem rather abstract from the outside, discussed in terms of x hundred million being cut from a multi-year deal. But what that translates to on the ground is very real indeed.

The impact of reductions to the UK’s Overseas Development Aid (ODA) budget, which in turn means cuts to funds already committed under the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), was well articulated in an interview with one of the many affected researchers on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science programme.

Speaking a day or two before the government stepped in to assure funding for the UK’s association to Horizon Europe – but not for the research programmes affected by the reduced ODA budget – the scientist in question was audibly furious, disbelieving and shattered by the impact on her project on malaria transmission, involving her team at the Sanger Institute and researchers in Mali.

After two years of preparatory work, including a year spent building an insect facility and installing a £60,000 piece of laboratory equipment – the only one of its kind in West Africa – she faced reworking the project without two-thirds of this year’s budget. Worse still, “there’s no sense of what’s next – this is this year’s budget, but we’re not told what next year will hold”, she explained.

An added irony in this sorry saga, as Inside Science pointed out, is that the cuts follow hot on the heels of the UK government’s integrated review of foreign policy, which put science at the heart of its “Global Britain” strategy. Indeed, the strategy explicitly states that its aim is to “build a strong and varied network of international science partnerships” and to “continue to use ODA to support R&D partnerships with developing countries”.

The UK research community was understandably relieved when an additional £250 million was found to alleviate concerns about how association to Horizon Europe would be paid for.

But that has not answered all the questions about how serious the government is in its stated desire for the UK to be a science superpower, and one that operates and collaborates on a truly global basis.

Asked recently whether UKRI could not have shuffled budgets to maintain GCRF commitments, Dame Ottoline Leyser, UKRI’s chief executive, said that the reduced funding was “not just a budget, it’s a cap, so we can’t use money from elsewhere to make up the deficit”.

Which raises the question, again, of whether the government means what it says about its scientific ambition – and in particular whether the department responsible for the science budget, BEIS, is fighting its corner with sufficient gusto and insight into how science works.

Writing in this week’s Times Higher Education, Andrew Thompson, professor of global and imperial history at the University of Oxford and, as executive chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, one of the architects of the GCRF in 2015, says that as important as the UK’s connection to Horizon Europe is (and it really is), the country must not limit itself to the opportunities further afield.

“For the UK research base to be as impactful as it is productive, we must build capacity to work on global challenges across national boundaries,” he writes.

“The scale and complexity of the Covid-19 crisis has taught us that multilateral cooperation is a sine qua non of any exit strategy and it is a similar story for other 21st-century problems.”

Thompson cites the GCRF as a pioneer in this regard, “reconnecting economic with social and environmental issues, and by forging new, more equitable partnerships between northern and southern researchers”.

This idea of knowledge as a solution to global shared challenges, but also as one of the bonds that tie us together at a time of great stress and strain, was articulated well at last week’s THE MENA Universities Summit.

Safwan Masri, executive vice-president for global development at Columbia University, argued that when knowledge was being “weaponised” by some geopolitical actors, it was more important than ever that universities actively protect their unique status and role as impartial conduits.

The vaccines that we all hope will bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control, he said, “represent decades’ worth, perhaps even centuries’ worth, of university-generated knowledge – distilled down to little more than an ounce of liquid, all concentrated in a single shot”.

That happened because “literally tens of thousands of researchers over the course of decades criss-crossed the globe and criss-crossed sectors, generating the knowledge that informed the vaccine’s design”.

Is it really a good idea to step back from supporting that process after the year we have had?

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com