Once upon a time the news that the budget for particle physics and astronomy in the UK was going to keep pace with inflation for three years (see Physics fails to keep pace in the UK) would have been greeted with jubilation. After declining in real terms for the past 20 years, a period of stability for researchers currently funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council was long overdue. Instead, however, British particle physicists and astronomers find themselves looking with envy at scientists in other disciplines – notably those in the life and biomedical sciences – as they wonder what happened to their share of the extra £400m that the government plans to invest in the science base over the next three years. Welcome to what the government calls “the post-genome challenge”, the cornerstone of its new science policy.
Put simply, the post-genome challenge is to fully understand all the genes in the human genome, and then exploit this knowledge in the health-care, food and other industries. The post-genome approach certainly has much to recommend it. It will produce a lot of new and exciting science for industry to exploit, and train a great many scientists for companies to employ as the emphasis shifts from research through development to production. No one can criticize it as a short-term option.
Although there is absolutely no reason why the new money should have been distributed according to historical spending patterns, the size of the shift to the life sciences has come as a surprise to many. It also indicates a remarkable convergence of the two main strands of government science policy – the creation of wealth and the improvement in the quality of life – into a single genome-dominated philosophy. The post-genome challenge receives five paragraphs in the document announcing the allocation of the science budget, compared with just one on IT and communications, the other area of science and technology expected to dominate the economy in the next century. The UK is never going to produce an Intel or a Sony and the government seems to have accepted this.
What will stick in the throats of particle physicists and astronomers, however, is that they have played by the government’s rules in recent years – the CERN subscription has been reduced and one of the Royal Observatories has been closed – but they are still at the back of the queue when new money is being handed out. Their colleagues in mainstream physics – most of whom are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) – have fared better with a real-terms increase of 3.5%. However, the extra money comes with strings attached – two-thirds of it must be used to fund research that underpins work in biology, medicine and the environment. The EPSRC has already taken steps in this direction: its physics programme recently announced an initiative in “physics for health care” and has awarded grants to physicists working on the theory of protein folding.
Now, more than ever before, it is essential for the physics community – including particle physicists and astronomers – to highlight the spin-offs from research. The new emphasis on the genome should not cause any problems. Moreover, the budget document makes it clear that life scientists are bona fide “users” of physics research. A huge number of physics-based techniques have already become established in the life and biomedical sciences – X-rays, magnetic resonance, positron emission tomography, ultrasound and many others – and continue to do so: witness the way that protein crystallographers will be among the main users of synchrotron radiation sources in the future.
And as this magazine has argued several times before, there are countless opportunities for physicists to contribute to both the diagnosis and treatment of disease – see, for instance, last month’s special issue on “New Directions in Medical Physics” – and the most basic research in the life sciences. Next September, for example, we will publish a special issue on “Physics and the Fundamental Challenges in Biology”. Welcome to post-genome physics.
