Venerable scientific institutes around the United Kingdom could be forced to close under a new funding scheme, according to an open letter signed by more than 400 scientists that urges Patrick Vallance, the U.K. science minister, to reconsider the changes.
Under the plans, the Medical Research Council (MRC), the U.K.’s primary public funder of medical research, will end its rolling funding of university-hosted research units, many of which have been around for decades. Instead, MRC will award large grants to new Centres of Research Excellence (CoREs), which aim to tackle specific challenges within a 14-year funding period. The first two CoREs, which will focus on gene therapies, were announced on 11 December.
MRC says the changes are necessary to produce “transformative” biomedical research in a fixed time frame.
But the petitioners say the decision was made without transparency or input from the scientific community and will result in the loss of important research infrastructure and institutional memory. The move “seems like, scientifically and strategically, an incredibly backward step,” says Tim Dalgleish, a clinical psychologist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU) at the University of Cambridge.
Each of the 19 MRC Units—which together receive about £100 million annually from MRC—focuses on a specific research topic, such as biostatistics, prions, or epidemiology. Many have long histories: The MRC Toxicology Unit at Cambridge was founded in 1947 to research industrial hazards, for instance, and the MRC Biostatistics Unit was founded in 1914.
MRC announced the changes to its funding model in July 2022, but many scientists had hoped the new U.K. government elected in July 2024 would reverse the decision. However, Vallance defended the move in the U.K. Parliament in October, precipitating the new open letter.
Although the units can in principle apply to replace their funding with CoRE and other grants, the signatories fear many will shut down. Glasgow’s Social and Public Health Sciences Unit (SPHSU) is already set to close in March 2025 because of the changes, and other units will face a reckoning at the end of their regular 5-year review periods, says William Astle, a biostatistician at the MRC Biostatistics Unit.
Astle says the CoRE grants can’t fully substitute for existing MRC Unit funding, which pays for research staff, Ph.D. students, technicians, premises, and research equipment. CoRE grants cover fewer staff expenses and do not support a department’s infrastructure, Astle says. They are also smaller—although some MRC Units have had budgets of about £9 million annually, CoRE grants are capped at £3 million.
MRC Executive Chair Patrick Chinnery says that under the new model, units can seek salary support from other sources such as universities and grants. MRC has “worked very closely with universities … so that there can be plans in place to try and help manage this transition,” he adds. The move has received “overwhelming support” across the country and will be a “huge opportunity” for universities that don’t currently host MRC units. The overall level of funding will remain the same under the new system, Chinnery says.
Staff at the units aren’t reassured. “I’m not really convinced that there’s a way to cobble together 25 different grants to replicate what we used to have,” says Michael Anderson, a cognitive scientist at Cambridge’s CBU. The university hosts six MRC units that collectively employ more than 550 staff members. Staff at these units have been in talks with the university to take over funding their positions, but no agreement has yet been reached—and the sector is already in the middle of a funding crisis, Astle says.
Others worry basic research will lose out under the new model, which requires CoREs to show their work will have a real-world impact. Many of the topics the units focus on don’t fit a challenge-led and time-limited approach, says Marcia Gibson, who researches social determinants of health at SPHSU: “The ability to take a really long-term perspective on major scientific challenges is just not something you get elsewhere.”
MRC made its decisions behind closed doors and without giving the scientific community the chance to voice concerns, says Jenny Lennox, an official at the University and College Union (UCU) who helped organize the open letter. Chinnery denies this: The MRC panel that developed the plans included a unit director, he says, and MRC hosted webinars with the universities and unit directors to explain the changes, revising the proposals based on their feedback. But Astle says the process “fell dramatically short of meaningful consultation,” with feedback solicited only after plans were largely finalized. The panel has not published meeting minutes to help the community understand its rationale, Gibson says.
“It is a difficult issue,” said Kieron Flanagan, a science policy researcher at the University of Manchester, in an email to Science. “On the one hand, funders have limited resources and there is always going to be a challenge when they want to try something new because, very often, it will involve stopping funding something old.” But the critics have valid concerns about the lack of clarity surrounding the plans, he says.
Anderson foresees difficult times for CBU. The uncertainty is likely to trigger an exodus of skilled staff, including the radiographers and physicists needed for brain imaging experiments, he says. “I want to stay if I can. But frankly, you get fed up at a certain point,” he says. “There will reach a point at which this lack of stability will be fatal to a place like this.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/funding-overhaul-threatens-historic-u-k-research-units
