The British government is investing £750 million ($1.1 billion) to bolster the ailing biotech industry and other commercial science and technology sectors.

Image: flickr/Mjuboy

The new Strategic Investment Fund "will encourage exports, support inward investment, promote research and development and harness commercially our world-class science base," Alistair Darling, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, said today (Apr. 22) in his budget speech to parliament.

"The small and medium sized companies that make up the bioscience sector in the UK have been hit hard by the current financial crisis," Clive Dix, chairman of the BioIndustry Association, said in a statement. "It is essential that the fund is now implemented rapidly."

The Technology Strategy Board, the leading public agency for supporting business innovation, will receive £50 million ($72 million) of the fund to invest "in areas which have high potential to drive future growth, such as low-carbon technologies, advanced manufacturing, and the life sciences." £250 million ($362 million) of the fund is earmarked for low-carbon investments, and a further £10 million ($14 million) is allocated for UK Trade & Investment, a government agency that helps businesses compete internationally.

John Jeans, deputy CEO of the Medical Research Council (MRC), was "delighted that the potential within the life sciences is being recognized" by the government. "The healthcare and biotech sectors present huge opportunities for the sustainable recovery of the UK economy," he said in a statement.

The fund falls short of the £1 billion ($1.4 billion) that the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) called for last December. Nonetheless, NESTA's chief executive Jonathan Kestenbaum welcomed the initiative. "The fund will give a new vibrancy to the UK's technology market and will bring about deep and lasting change to our economy," he said in a statement.

Government funding for basic research, however, will receive no additional funds. Buried deep on page 130 of the new budget, the government called on the public research councils, including the MRC and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, to reallocate £106 million ($154 million) of their pre-existing budgets to support key areas with predicted economic potential -- a plan which leaves some science lobby groups less than happy.

Such government "meddling" undermines the funding bodies' autonomy, said Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science & Engineering. "The research councils are supposed to be independent from the government," he told The Scientist. Rather than boosting the funding councils' budgets, as the US stimulus package did for the NIH and NSF, the current budget simply moves money around, he said. Dusic added, though, that he applauds the additional investment in science through the Strategic Investment Fund.


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