The press have got quite animated about the dangers to the UK university system if swingeing cuts are made, largely because the aims of the last government to get a much higher proportion of young people into the university system mean that many of their readers will be feeling extremely anxious for their own children, to continue the intergenerational theme – but also because we have active spokespeople at the highest levels who are doing a fine job of lobbying. Somehow, we as scientists need to get more vocal at all levels to ensure the media understand better the all-pervasiveness of science, and the dangers – for their readers AND their children – if the science funding is cut too deeply. We need to keep up the fight against short-termism and populism, of the sort that saw mephedrone reclassified, without waiting for robust scientific advice to support its perceived dangers or even to check that it had indeed led to the deaths that the media howled about. This is not about entitlement, it is about ensuring that we make our case whenever and wherever we can. Something I know you, Richard, have been engaged in more than most of us. We need to do this at every possible opportunity, however hard the fight to get our words correctly reported or the sentiments we want to express taken on board by journalists struggling with the vocabulary. Speaking as someone who avoided the media for many years because of getting burnt by them, I have come to realise this is not an adequate position to take.

Many thanks to you and Mark for your warm words. It is not my intention to use the ‘silly title’ much, as one of the greater than ‘rank and file’ scientists described it to me this weekend (though not one on your list of the great and good). To be technical, though, I do intend to use the post-nominal.

I absolutely agree with you about science as a special interest group. I think the sense of entitlement that seems sometimes to accompany these arguments is fantastically unhelpful (there were some particularly bad examples of this around the time when the STFC funding crisis first emerged) and I tried very hard to avoid that tone here.

As for rank-and-file – well, that’s relative. I may still be a PVC (though I wasn’t one when nominated for this working group) but I’m not a former science minister (like Waldegrave and Sainsbury), I don’t run the world’s largest research charity or a major international research funder (Walport, Nowotny), I am not a leading science policy specialist (Nowotny again, Martin) and I don’t have a Nobel Prize (Nurse, Evans). Which leaves me, Richard Friend, Emily Holmes and Ann Dowling as representatives of the science and engineering rank and file.

Indeed, my warmest congratulations to Dame Athene!

This is of course good stuff, but I just wonder what is happening to industrial research. If industry is cutting back in the recession to protect its bottom line today so that there is a tomorrow, then there is the argument that cutting back on public funded research today allows us to invest in it tomorrow.

Another argument that concerns me is the view that we are somehow special. As far as a hard-nosed politician is concerned I guess we are another special interest group. Funding research for tomorrow does not help health or education, and nor does it reduce poverty today.

I am not making these points because I believe them, but because, that I think they ought to be addressed.

Here in France investment seems pretty good, so the dynamism of competing nations is a powerful argument to make even if it does not address either of the points above.

That’ll do, but before I go, since when were you rank-and-file? I’ve only been out of the country for four weeks, but you are still pro-vice chancellor, right?

Regards

Mark

PS A propos of not very much, well done to Athene!