Netherlands creates Minister for Research

Sustaining research funding in Europe remains complex and challenging. Solid representation in Government is probably the only way to secure a future for innovative research.

Good news from the Netherlands. It has created a new minister for research and universities. Molecular biologist Ronald Plasterk will fill the new post, bringing experience as a top flight researcher as well as nearly 10 years of involvement in Dutch politics.

I met Plasterk more than a decade ago at a residential training course at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Long Island, NY). The workshop brought together everyone from PhD students (like me at the time) to professors to learn a new technique aimed at discovering genes involved in learning and memory.

Plasterk was already a rising star back then, having just returned to the Netherlands to start his own research group after postdocs in the US and UK . I remember him as open and friendly, participating in the lab work with as much enthusiasm as the PhD students.

News of Plasterk's appointment came at the same time as a squabble in the UK about research funding. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) had just announced that £65 million of funding initially allocated to research had instead been spent propping up the Rover car company and maintaining Britain's aging nuclear energy infrastructure.

The DTI blithely announced the funding cut as a mere budget reallocation from one division to another. But as Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Council head Professor Julia Goodfellow explained, "science and innovation is about the medium term. If you start cutting it because of short term need then you have real problems".

Medical Research Council head Professor Colin Blakemore agrees. In an interview with the BBC he explained that "it might be time to take science funding out of the DTI's hands". There was a need, he said, for "science to be handled and administered really quite distinctly and separately from the rest of government".

Out of sight, out of mind
The report on the BBC website described the general downward trend in scientific research funding in the EU. The editorial suggested that the cause of this was "the switch away from manufacturing [in Europe], the industrial sector that does the most R&D".

This is an insightful remark.

Has there really been a disruption in the natural flow of funds between the consumers of innovation, i.e. manufacturers, and the producers of innovation, researchers? Who could have predicted that relocating manufacturing outside of Europe could disrupt this flow?