Science funding cuts will harm Britain’s global standing | Letters

Letters: Readers respond to an editorial about the threat to research funding, including plans to close the Jodrell Bank Observatory

Your editorial rightly criticises the decision to cease funding the Lovell telescope from March 2028 (The Guardian view on the Lovell telescope: budget cuts to physics are bad science and worse politics, 31 July). There are additional reasons why this decision is so shortsighted. Modern astronomy is no longer simply physics. It brings together physics, chemistry, biology and computing to understand how the universe evolved and where we came from. The universe is an inexpensive laboratory in which we can study the interaction of physical, chemical and biological processes under conditions that can never be reproduced on Earth. Understanding how galaxies formed and evolved requires complementary observations across the radio, optical and infrared spectrum. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As a PhD researcher at Jodrell Bank in the 1960s, I saw first-hand how its innovations transformed radio astronomy. Jodrell played a pioneering role in the development of long-baseline radio interferometry, which links separate telescopes together to create virtual telescopes thousands of miles across. Removing the Lovell telescope from this network would weaken its ability to produce pictures of the radio universe with a sharpness comparable to that achieved by billion-pound space observatories such as Hubble.

The Lovell telescope still plays a role in science diplomacy and it has long been a symbol of UK scientific leadership and hope. Ministers should think again.
George Kildare Miley
Emeritus professor of astronomy, Leiden University, the Netherlands

• The shortsighted attitude to science funding goes back to Margaret Thatcher. In the late 1980s I was briefly the economic adviser to the chief scientist, working in the Cabinet Office. The policy was to rate research funding on objective criteria such as the number of peer-reviewed publications and citations, and also to focus funding on research expected to have economic benefits in the near term. It was assumed that, as an economist, I would be a primary advocate for this approach. I argued that there was no methodology for assessing which research would turn out to be economically beneficial. There still isn’t.

I also argued that the attempt to quantify research success by counting publications was leading to counterproductive effects – pressure to publish too much and too soon, multiple authors on every paper and a high-stress atmosphere that is fundamentally counterproductive to good research.

I also found myself the sole advocate in the Cabinet Office for supporting research for its own sake – to advance human knowledge. We are made far poorer culturally as well as economically if we close the spaces in which talented people are given the time and funding to follow wherever their creativity leads them.
Mick Foster
Chelmsford, Essex

• The UK Research and Innovation budget is expected to rise to £10bn by 2030. However, UKRI consists of research councils (which mostly fund fundamental science) plus Innovate UK. The latter funds only companies, and only its budget has risen. That for research councils has plummeted, by 40%-50% in real terms since 2011. As universities also grab a higher proportion of grants in “overheads”, the amount of actual science being funded is even lower. The flow of postdoctoral fellows needed to work in innovative industries is consequently being choked.
Douglas Kell
Oxford

• Thank you for an excellent editorial on the devastating cuts to major projects and research facilities, announced in a year when UKRI received a record budget settlement. The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) upgrade, a top priority of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, endorsed by Cern Council with UK support, has been particularly hard hit. The announced withdrawal of funding risks cutting off a generation of UK scientists from the future of one of Cern’s four flagship experiments.

The UK’s leadership in LHCb was built through decades of sustained investment. The UK should now reap the returns: graduates skilled in AI and data science; advances in semiconductors, materials and technology; students who are attracted to science by the opportunity to work at a world-leading laboratory; and, crucially, a reputation as a trusted partner capable of participating in and hosting major international projects.

Withdrawing previously secured funding has shocked international partners. It undermines UK leadership, drastically reduces opportunities for PhD students and postdocs, and damages technological development.

This investment represents less than 0.05% of the UK’s £10bn annual research budget. We hope that it will be swiftly restored.
Paula Collins
LHCb deputy spokesperson, Cern

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