Boycott the behemoth

The RAE wastes resources, stifles innovation and undermines important research, argues Denis Noble.

At the height of the public row over science funding in the 1980s, Max Perutz, the man responsible for creating Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology, one of the most successful and innovative laboratories in the world, met the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to warn against the over-direction of science.

The LMB's success, he said, lay not in its director telling people what to do, but in encouraging the creativity of individuals prepared to run against the fashion and do genuinely ground-breaking research. The double helix, after all, had been worked out by scientists who were not even supposed to be working on that project.

His argument resonated well with the tradition of British science, which for most of the 20th century (roughly up to the end of the 1970s) enjoyed a level of success way beyond the power of its purse. The answer to American "big-funded" science was to live by our wits. That meant supporting the odd-balls, even if they had necessary periods of apparently low productivity. And we did that very successfully until the funding crunch started the process that has reached its corrosive climax in the research assessment exercise.

While a few universities have proudly claimed their prizes, the majority have lost out despite having improved their RAE grades. Debate has now turned to how to do even better next time to ensure a bigger share of the pie.

I hope that there will not be a next time. If this experience does not convince us all that we are going down the wrong road, then I do not know what will.

We appointed some of the best minds in the country to serve on the panels. We then pitched all the other best minds in the country into an exercise to try to outwit them. Half the game consisted not in identifying who is and who is not internationally recognised - which is the easy bit - but what the rules would be on whether a formulaic 4, 5, or 5* would be awarded.

It is easy to make fun of the exercise. Departments that are clearly among the nation's prestigious heavyweights have been humiliated by being awarded a grade lower than much less significant departments who guessed the rules correctly. And we wasted the precious research time of everyone on both sides of this game.

This is fiddling while Rome burns. I do not for one moment believe that the quality of British science has taken a quantum leap between the last round and the present one. What has happened is that we have all became adept at playing the rules. Do we go on like this? Will we have even more 5 and 5* departments next time? Does anyone believe that this has any relevance to where British science stands in the world?

Navel-gazing on this scale is a sign of weakness. If we were sure of ourselves, we would not waste time trying to measure the immeasurable. Repetition of this process will be corrosive because it encourages staying on course and penalises innovation.

Most important, it is completely unnecessary. If you want to measure the research success of all the departments in the country, we already have such an exercise. It is on-going, highly competitive and it gives almost the same results. It is the process of competing for research grants. Worse still, much the same panels of best minds sit on the grant funding panels as on the RAE panels.

There is a simple solution - let dual support become genuinely dual and let full support costs follow the winning of research grants. We would not then have the mad system of universities winning major research funding only to find that they cannot afford to support the work proposed. It is possible in the present system for the department getting the highest research grants to fail to receive the support costs that should go with those grants.

My dream would be that the top five RAE performers say together that they will never again take part in such an exercise. The weight of that combination would be impressive. My guess though is that, sadly, we will continue to see each other as the enemy. The enemy is without, not within.

Denis Noble is professor of physiology at Oxford University. This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Oxford Magazine.