Sir

Readers of Nature may get the impression that funding for basic research in the United Kingdom is in good health (“Calling for entrepreneurs: London” Naturejobs 19 September, 4–5; 2002). We wish to put the record straight.

The UK government uses the periodic Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to determine levels of funding for university departments and institutes. Following the latest RAE, funding for hospital-based clinical subjects, which underpins the core of translational research in medical schools across the United Kingdom, was severely cut. Despite having received, for the third consecutive time, the highest possible rating (5*), the Institute of Ophthalmology in London faces a 19.7% cut in its predicted annual budget because the government has failed to honour its pre-RAE fiscal commitments. The problem is even greater for those who received a rating of 5 and who now face a massive 38% cut.

This takes £970,000 (US$1.5 million) a year out of our operating budget. We are unable to appoint even a single technical post that we require to run newly commissioned laboratories, which puts extra stress on academic staff. The cuts also exacerbate the financial difficulties faced by our parent body, University College London, after years of underfunding.

The reason UK medical schools are having problems is self-evident, and the crisis extends across the country. In the longer term our institute, together with others in hospital-based clinical subjects, will be less able to fulfil its mission, which is to deliver the translational research that enables laboratory science to be developed into clinical trials and ultimately into benefits to patients.

The message appears to be that, with regard to translational medical research, the government is not only blind to the achievements of 5* departments and institutes, it has also, incomprehensibly, decided to slash the support they receive. We also suspect that the cuts are due at least in part to inept planning and muddled thinking. Institutes such as ours have to budget, recruit and develop a coherent research strategy within the constraints of government policy. It is therefore essential that the government keeps its promises. This it has not done. In the United Kingdom the phrase 'science policy' has become an oxymoron.

If, as I. B. Holland suggests (Nature 419, 248; 200210.1038/419248b), underfunding is less acute here than in other European countries, then the prospects for our continent of beleaguered researchers must be bleak. Governments are often short-sighted when it comes to policy development, but in this case we are confronted by a total lack of vision. And as we are only too well aware at this institute, myopia may be corrected but blindness remains virtually untreatable.