Genetics mutates and grows

THES reporters look at how departments prepared for and responded to last week's research assessments.

GENETICS: CAMBRIDGE

1992 rating: 5

1996 rating: 5*

Since the 1992 research assessment exercise when Cambridge University's genetics department received a 5, the department has seen a large staff turnaround, writes Julia Hinde. The head of department came and went and there was change in almost a dozen research fellows.

But confidence in research ability remains high and was justified when the department scored a 5* in this year's ratings.

With more than 170 workers divided into 24 research groups, the department is engaged in a vast range of research, from the genetics of bacteria to theoretical population genetics and human genome mapping. The department says its unifying theme is the application of genetic methodologies to solving biological problems.

Though scoring well in the RAE is important to the morale of the department's researchers, Ian MacDonald, acting head of the department, said the score will make little difference to the budget his department receives.

"What comes from the HEFCE is quite tiny compared to what comes to the department from research charities and sponsors. Only around a third to a quarter of the department's income comes directly from the university."

He estimates that in 1995/96, the genetics department was given Pounds 800,000 from central university funds, most of which was spent on salaries for the dozen permanent university staff and on the department's running costs. Yet overall the department costs around Pounds 2.5 million. This extra money, mostly from medical charities and research councils, afforded a further dozen research fellows who are employed mostly on five-year contracts.

According to Cahir O'Kane, who compiled the department's RAE submission and who has joined from Warwick University as a lecturer since the last RAE, the number of independent research fellows has almost doubled, with the total number of staff in the department increasing by 50 per cent since 1992.

Dr O'Kane believes funding from medical charities and other sponsors would not be greatly influenced by a slight drop in a department's rating.

"Sponsors would almost all award on the basis of individual research proposals, not by department," he said, adding, however, that a lower grade may affect grants from funding councils for research students.

Dr MacDonald added: "There is a degree of cynicism throughout the university system about the RAE." He said this comes from the way the Government applied its funding criteria following the 1992 RAE.

Dr O'Kane said: "They capped the amount which would have gone to Oxford and Cambridge, effectively limiting the overall increase or decrease in one instituition. Had they applied the criteria rigorously, Oxford and Cambridge would have got more."

Among the research being undertaken in the department is an attempt to build up human genetic maps and to establish the order of genes along the human chromosome. Scientists can already tell which genes are present in DNA but it is hard for them to tell which genes are close together.

Researchers in the department are trying to do this by irradiating human cells with beta and gamma rays so that each chromosome is split in a random manner.

Each bit of split human DNA is unstable so it is immediately fused with hamster cells to form hybrid cells, which are then allowed to grow. Then the researchers test for different human genes in the hybrid cells.

The research relies on the fact that genes close to one another on the human chromosome will be found together on more pieces of fragmented chromosome than genes which are further apart.