Sir Mark Walportt
excerpted
In an interview with Times Higher Education to coincide with this week’s announcement of the first beneficiaries of the £56 million programme, Sir Mark said that the trust had concluded that the way to enable the best science was “to support the brightest minds and give them the flexibility to identify important research questions and the resources, including the time, to make a substantial contribution”.
Hence, the Investigator Awards are longer and larger – up to about £3 million – than traditional grants, and successful principal investigators can use them to tackle any important question within the trust’s remit to achieve “extraordinary improvements in human and animal health”.
“Applicants were asking for grants for up to seven years and no one could even attempt to say what they would be doing after years two or three, so the funding decision was based much more on the strength of their vision and approach,” Sir Mark explained.
(Sir Mark) noted that the majority of Investigator Awards did not “immediately have translational implications”. “Everyone knows answering quite basic questions gives unpredictable answers that may turn out to be extremely important,” he said.
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Critics have claimed that the size of the awards increases the opportunity for top researchers to rack up funding and grow overly large groups. The trust’s focus on funding the best science means Sir Mark is relaxed about the fact that the trust will be financing fewer principal investigators than under its previous grant scheme.
Sir Mark agreed that there “comes a point at which a lab becomes so big that principal investigators lose control of what is going on” and said the trust had sought to assure itself that “what we were providing was core and was not duplicating what (applicants) already have”….But he noted that some “very senior” applicants had been turned down while others had been given shorter awards than they had asked for.
Seven of the 27 inaugural awards have been made in the “new investigator” category for early career researchers.
Nor is he worried that 21 of the first recipients of Investigator Awards are from the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London – although he admitted that as a matter of national policy, “overconcentration geographically is not a good thing”. Worries on that topic were provoked by the research councils’ recent announcement in their delivery plans of similar changes to their grant programmes. Sir Mark, (however) also noted that “While the UK is as good as it is, we are able very effectively to spend our funds here and all the signs are it is going to remain strong,” (but denied that this was a threat).
“The tools of science are so powerful it is terribly important you don’t waste them on trivial matters,” he said.