British neuroscience funding is to be sliced. The UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) announced on 24 January that it would be scaling back its support of neuroscience, psychology and animal behaviour.
Such research accounts for about 13 percent of the agency’s roughly £150 million annual budget for research grants.
“Neuroscience is important, but it’s not the be all and end of all, even of biology,” says Alf Game, Deputy Director for delivery at the BBSRC. “As a proportion of the budget, the general view is that the amount we’re putting into this area, which is essentially demand led, is too much.”
The cuts are, in part, a response to a recent spending review by the British government that dealt flat budgets to BBSRC and other science funding agencies. BBSRC also identified key areas of research in its remit, such as nutrition, farm animal welfare and human ageing, that weren’t getting enough attention. “Something’s got to give,” Game says.
The agency hopes to pare neuroscience funding down to 10 percent of BBSRC’s research grant budget, he says. However, it has not yet instituted a hard cap on funding and instead hopes that some neuroscientists will look elsewhere for funding. “We’re trying to do this by persuasion and argument rather than by dictate at present,” Game says.
Peter McNaughton, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who receives BBSRC funding, says he was “gobsmacked” when he heard of the changes. “Why does it have to be neuroscience that bears the brunt of BBSRC cuts? I cannot see any reason for that,” he says. “A lot of good research won’t be funded.”
Trevor Robbins, head of the British Neuroscience Association and also at Cambridge, says that the other major source of neuroscience funding, the Medical Research Council, may not pick up the slack. “The MRC budget hasn’t been increased; I suspect they have some cuts to deal with as well.”
In 2009 MRC, spent £141 million pounds on neuroscience and mental health research, a figure that includes research grants, MRC institutes and other expenditures.
However, Robbins and other critics of the new policy also point out that neuroscience research is being penalized for its success. “This is a very strong area in UK research. So why should you cut excellence. Why not look at areas that are not so strong and cut those.”
Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, worries that the cuts will undermine basic research without obvious or immediate applications, such as his own work on a new class of photoreceptors in vertebrates. “It’s fine, everybody talking about translational science, but you’ve got have something to translate.”
Image: PET scan of a human brain courtesy Wikimedia Commons