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British scientists rally to protest funding cuts

sci is vital.jpgSeveral hundred scientists and supporters of science gathered outside the UK Treasury in London on Saturday afternoon to protest imminent cuts to government science funding – an unusual move by a community that rarely takes to the streets to voice its displeasure.

The protest was organised by the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) and Science is Vital, a campaign group started about a month ago by University College London postdoctoral researcher Jennifer Rohn in response to Business Secretary Vince Cable’s speech suggesting that around 45% of scientific research is not of a sufficiently high standard to justify funding it in these tough economic times. Rohn spoke to Nature earlier this week about their campaign.

Science funding is likely to be cut as part of the government’s comprehensive spending review, to be finalised some time in the next few weeks. All departments will be expected to absorb cuts of up to 25% over the next four years as the coalition looks to save £83 billion.

Evan Harris, who was Liberal Democrat science spokesman until he lost his seat at the last general election, led the proceedings which included short speeches by Colin Blakemore, the ex-head of the Medical Research Council, and science writers Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre, among others. Many of the protesters were sporting their lab coats and the atmosphere remained upbeat throughout, despite Harris’ attempts to get the crowd to join him in song.

The campaigners argue that scientific research represents a sound financial investment, and that cuts would decimate British science, driving a generation of scientists abroad and scaring off those who might have brought their expertise to the UK from other countries.

Their argument is compelling. As Blakemore says, many nations are increasing science funding as they look for ways to boost faltering economies. China, Germany, France, Sweden and the United States are all spending more on science despite the tough financial climate.

The organisers said around 2,000 people attended the rally, and more than 25,000 people have signed Science is Vital’s petition calling for science funding to be maintained, including many of the great and good of UK science.

Disclaimer: Nature is a supporter of Science is Vital.

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  1. Report this comment

    Paul Fernhout said:

    To summarize what I detail here: https://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/

    The value of most human labor has been declining due to a combination of limited demand and labor replacement.

    Demand is limited for at least three reasons:

    • the typical business cycled of expansion/contraction that everyone talks about and reduced cash availability;
    • social progress like environmenetalism, voluntary simplicity, spirituality, diminishing returns for more junk, and moving up Malsow’s hierarchy of needs to be more self-actualizing; and
    • the concentration of wealth from business in ever fewer hand as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (relatively) and the rich put most of their money into a non-physical “Casino economy” of financial speculation like derivatives and currency fluctations (see Money as Debt II).

    Most human labor is being relaced by a combination of three factors:

    • robotics and other automation (that replace human labor directly or allow one person to do the work of several);
    • better design (that makes things last longer, be easier to produce, or reduces the need for other things); and
    • voluntary social networks (like of Slashdot contributors instead of paid reporters).

    As more people are unemployed, there is a downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Trying to mandate higher wages or better working conditions just accelerates the pace at which companies are motivated to replace workers (even scientists) with automation etc..

    There are at least five bad solutions to this problem and four good solutions.

    The bad solutions generally involve makework and suffering. The are currently beng tried and involve:

    • endless low-level warfare (that could flare up at any moment into WWIII);
    • endless schooling (in the past people learned on the job, now you need two PhDs and three post-docs before you’re allowed to do anything);
    • endless prisons (the USA has two million in jail and millions more on probation);
    • endless bureaucracy (in Kafkaesque ways of people making paperwork for each other); and
    • endless sickness (most serious disease in adults is preventable with a diet heavy in vegetables and fruits, adequate vitamin D, and some other supplements, plus some other basics — see Dr. Fuhrman, Dr. Cannell, and Bluezones — but there is not much profit or much employment in prevention or cure — only in endless treatments).

    The good solutions involve extending for positive social trends to:

    • a basic income (social security of all regardless of age or need);
    • a gift economy (Debian, Wikipedia, Slashdot, etc.)
    • democratic resource-based planning (using taxes, subsidies, and regulation); and
    • stronger local subsistence communities that can provide for themselves (like with organic gardneing, 3D printing, solar energy, and so on).

    We need a combination of all these efforts. Layoffs of researchers actually make a twisted sort of sense to reduce the speed at which most human labor is being devalued, but overall, with the proper soci-economic paradigm, more good research should help everyone. Unfortunately, our economic paradigm is based more around rationing scarcity than around creating universal abundance. Ironically, we even turn the tools of abundance into weapons to create artificial scarcity to prop up the old paradigm — with likely eventual trgic consequences given things like nuclear energy, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, and robotics can make very powerful, if ironic, weapons.

    What Albert Einstein said about nuclear energy could be applied to science in general — everything has changed but our way of (socio-economic) thinking…

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