The campaign to protect science funding in the UK really has had an unprecedented momentum behind it.  Those of us study anything science-related at Cambridge have been inundated with e-mails, calls for petitions and invitations to protest rallies.  We can only imagine what the reaction in Whitehall was last week on the arrival of several thousand angry geeks in lab coats.  And to be fair, it’s had some impressive success.  The comprehensive spending review has frozen science funding rather than cutting it (although this still means a cut in real terms) which is about as good as its going to get.  In fact I think my fellow lab-rats and I have dodged a bullet this time round.  The real question now, is how to deal with the aftermath. 

The rhetoric for the pro-science lobby has been pretty well-versed.  Science leads to innovation, innovation leads to new areas of investment which lead to new jobs and good boost to the economy.  Most estimates say that for every pound you put into science, you’ll get 10 or 20 back in the economy.  But it goes deeper than that. In fact the “holy cow” of pro-science rhetoric says that as well as funding the directly applied research i.e. the semiconductors, medical treatments and energy solutions; we also need to fund the so-called blue sky research which looks at the more fundamental questions and often leads to some pretty unpredictable outcomes too (the invention of the internet at CERN is the most common example usually given).  I like to see this as a rather crude analogy to the infinite  monkeys working at their type-writers until one of them comes up with a script to Hamlet, which is only an unfair comparison because instead of an infinitely large pile of monkey-nonsense we do actually get out some pretty insightful truths about the nature of the universe.  Nevertheless, the supposed necessity of funding blue-sky research is an established argument but one which I’d argue might have reached the end of its mileage, putting the holy cow into the proverbial meat-grinder. 

How so, I hear you ask (while the particle physicists load up their shotguns)?  Simply put, the argument that most gets overlooked is that we often see unpredicted outcomes from the research which is already applied to begin with.  Take the current investment in Nuclear Fusion research funded by the French government, for example.  While the direct aim is to produce an alternative to fossil fuels, the by-product is myriad of new and improved technologies, mostly in laser and plasma physics. 

Of course nobody is suggesting we just pull out of the major science facilities like the Large Hadron Collider, especially as they’re just about to churn out some exciting data (fingers crossed!).  And any case we can all agree that blue sky research has its merits to say the least.  But perhaps there’s a more balanced way of doing things.  Some have pointed to the concept of the Pasteur quadrant, an idea named after the French researcher who studied the spoilage of milk and ended up uncovering a new field of microbiology.  Rather than being guided by just passion for knowledge or drive for industrial application, Pasteur considered both to be equally important.  And it is this idea which may well come to define the future of British science.  

The other issue that is seldom raised is how the knowledge of different researchers can be pooled both for mutual benefit and for industrial use.  If we take the example of the internet, it took 4 years before commercialisation was even considered.  Getting a research culture which bridges this gap between science and industry is part of the big challenge and one with which countries like Germany, Taiwan and the Netherlands have already got a head start on us.

So on balance, we don’t have to pretend that the spending review is the best things scientists could hope for; it blatantly isn’t!  But it should be a chance for us to rethink our priorities.  While most of us consider the “we can do more with less” mantra to be nothing more than cheap PR, for science there might just be a grain of truth in it.