NEWS

U.K. Government Responds to Criticism of Medical Research Council

John Illman

The U.K. government has dismissed a savage attack by an all-party parliamentary committee that accuses the state-funded Medical Research Council (MRC) of misguided strategies, poor financial management, and discriminating against younger researchers.

The controversy started in May when the Science and Technology Committee of the U.K. Parliament issued a report critical of the MRC, which is the principal government funder of medical research in the United Kingdom. The U.K. government issued its response in June.

The government’s robust defense of the MRC, which allocated about £60 million ($99 million) to cancer research in 2000–2001, includes 12 letters from unnamed "leading academics," maintaining that the committee "seriously misrepresented" the MRC, which has an "excellent track record in getting it right."

None are more outspoken or tough than Michael Baum, M.D., formerly based at Cancer Research U.K. and the University College London Cancer Trials Centre in London. Still in practice but recently retired from his university chair, he spent 7 years as chair of the U.K. Coordinating Committee for Cancer Research.

"Throughout my time in office, the MRC was the thorn in my flesh," he said. "Its bureaucracy impeded research. In no way, in all my experience, could I argue that the MRC facilitated high-quality breast cancer research. Throughout my time, it was a force for conservatism and impedance."

Baum said that MRC bureaucracy had added 18 months to any funded project, while denying funding to many others. "My other concern was that the MRC seemed to have contempt for clinical research—research actually delivering the goods," he said. "They were loaded with molecular biologists in such a way that the smaller the particle, the greater the chance of funding."

But George Radda, Ph.D., MRC chief executive, insisted that "Clinical research is a major priority for the MRC. A third of our research expenditure is spent in this way. Over the last 20 years the MRC has funded over 170 trials and a quarter of the current trials portfolio is in cancer."

Radda will step down later this year. He will leave behind, he insisted, a coordinated approval process for trial grants designed to speed up and streamline peer review. (This is the result of collaboration with Cancer Research U.K., the world’s largest independent cancer charity.)

The MRC, Radda added, is also a leading partner in the development of the new National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI)—set up to coordinate all research funded by government, charities and industry, and to double the number of patients recruited into clinical trials within 3 years. The hope is that this will reaffirm Britain as a first choice for pharmaceutical research.

But the Parliamentary Committee refuses to let the matter lie. Ian Gibson, Ph.D., chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer, said ministers had ignored their main contentions and even accused the MRC of "deliberately misleading" doctors and the media over the MRC’s financial problems.

"The weakness of the government’s response shows just how bad things have got at the MRC. It needs a complete overhaul," Gibson said.

Just how much money (the recurring theme of this controversy) is allocated to U.K. cancer research? There is no accurate data, according to a recent strategic analysis by the NCRI, but the total in the year 2000 was estimated to have been between £450 and £500 million ($740 and $827 million).

Oxford University neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, Ph.D., will take over for Radda in October. Blakemore, who has run some 18 marathons, is the focal point of the rage of extremists in the animal rights movement in Britain. He’s faced a stark choice, in his words, "between the crucial importance of scientific research and the safety of my family." Activists have hurled missiles through the windows of the family home and mailed letter bombs—one of which was opened by his children.

Did he perceive the MRC’s problem as primarily financial? "I think, to a very large extent, it’s a matter of cash," he said. "When cash is short, everyone demands more and more scrutiny, and more and more certainty about the decisions being made—and that tends to increase bureaucracy. But if you measure bureaucracy within the MRC by the cost of the administration, it’s relatively modest compared to most funding agencies. You could say that they should do more to speed things up, but then people would complain money was being spent on bureaucracy, and not research. You almost can’t win unless you have a huge excess.

"We can’t compete dollar for dollar against the United States. The entire MRC annual budget is equivalent to about half a day of U.S. military expenditure—a drop in the ocean compared with research of all types in the United States. So we have to be clever in selecting and backing the right people and doing it at a stage early enough in their career for it to have real influence."

Blakemore’s first MRC marathon may involve plans to dismantle its largest research center, at Mill Hill, in London, which has produced five Nobel prize winners. All 18 heads of department are reported "to have walked out in disgust" from a recent meeting with Radda and MRC chair Anthony Cleaver.



             
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