Tomorrow is Budget day. Having just finished AMRC’s own budget and business plan for 2011-2012 all I can say is: George you know where I am if you want to crunch some last minute numbers?
The Financial Times is reporting today that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce a £100million cash injection for capital projects to ameliorate the effects on science of cut-backs announced by Pfizer and Novartis since the beginning of the year.
Since the political message in the last few weeks has been about ‘reform’ I wonder whether we might also see some movement on the research regulation front. Not a great deal since the word is it will take years rather than months to disassemble the current system before putting in back along the lines suggested by the Academy of Medical Sciences in its report earlier this year. But something that suggests the Government is committed to speeding up the system and encouraging growth in the sector. And if they don’t, then it will be a salutory lesson that given a choice between an octopus and myself to make predictions, always go for the octupus.
Anyway, we shall be posting all the news from the budget here and on Becky’s fantastic policy blog – but visit here first please just so my stats are better than hers.
In other news, you may wish to look at AMRC’s submission to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into peer review published today. As I have said many times before, the UK has a good story to tell on the commitment of research charities to using peer review to allocate their research funding. Other written evidence submitted to the inquiry can be viewed on the committee’s website.
Plus, I should make mention of the final AMRC/UK National Stem Cell Network public engagement meeting – this time in York on 29th March 2011. The event will feature the screening of the award winning film ‘Indestructible’ which documents the declining health of a young American motor neurone disease sufferer, including his trip to China for a stem cell therapy. The film will be followed by a question and answer session with a panel of local experts.
Finally, a soft launch of an exciting new project that AMRC, together with the British Library, UKOLN at the University of Bath, Sage Bionetworks and the Digital Curation Centre and funded by JISC, will be undertaking over the next few months to investigate the potential of crowd- sourced “lay summaries”, derived from UK PubMed Central content, to enable the citizen- patient to better understand research. The project now has its very own blog which will be populated with a great deal more information very, very soon.
As CEO of a membership association I am used to crowd-surfing. So this is a new one on me and all the more exciting because of it.
Filed under: Academy of Medical Sciences, Budget 2011, Comprehensive Spending Review, Earl Howe, Financial Times, George Osborne, LifeSciences UK, Office for Life Sciences, Pfizer, Pharmaceuticals, science, stem cell research Tagged: Academy of Medical Sciences, AMRC, British Library, Budget 2011, capital research projects, Chancellor of the Exchequer, crowd-sourcing, George Osborne, health research regulation, House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, Indestructible, JISC, lay summaries, motor neurone disease, Novartis, peer review, Pfizer, stem cell research, UK National Stemm Cell Network, York
