APPENDIX 99
Memorandum from Professor Sir Philip Cohen,
University of Dundee
As the Director of a Medical Research Council
Unit, I would like to add a few thoughts about the current debate
as to whether NIMR should stay where it is or whether it should
relocate to a Central London site. I apologise for being slightly
past the deadline, but I understand that your committee will accept
late submissions.
Firstly, I would sincerely hope that the MRC
will not be criticised for considering this possibility, which
I believe to be timely for the following reasons. NIMR is not
in a great location. I think that most people would agree that
it would be much better if it were embedded in a Higher Education
Institute and/or a Research-active hospital. Proximity to an HEI
would greatly extend the range of its scientific interactions
and create critical mass in particular areas that can be so crucial
to setting up collaborations with the Pharmaceutical and Biotech
industry.
Proximity to a research-active hospital would
expose it to the clinical culture that it lacks at present and
encourage more doctors to undertake research training, the lack
of which has been a major weakness in the UK medical system for
many years
Although everyone would agree that NIMR has
a number of excellent scientists, it is not nearly the force it
once was and its value for money can be questioned. For example,
I recently commissioned ISI to compare the MRC Unit that I direct
with the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) and NIMR in
terms of the number of times scientific papers published over
the past 10 years are quoted by other scientists in their own
publications. I then divided the number of citations by the annual
cost to the MRC of funding each centre. NIMR came far below LMB
(and even further behind my own Unit!).
NIMR needs an increased commitment to translational
research, and hence wealth creation, in which its track record
is relatively weak. My own Unit is involved in one of the largest
collaborations ever undertaken between the Pharmaceutical Industry
and a UK research institution. The collaboration not only involves
the eight different research teams in my Unit but five other research
teams working in complementary areas, who work in close proximity
to the Unit in the School of Life Sciences at the University of
Dundee. The critical mass created by these 13 research groups
has been critical to the success of this venture.
My personal view is that the LMB is really Britain's
NIMR, and I am also concerned that two of the three MRC Institutes
in the UK (at NIMR and Hammersmith) are both located in London.
I can see significant advantages for UK Biomedical Science as
a whole if only part of NIMR moved to Central London (for example
virology and immunology where obvious synergisms with clinical
research are possible) while other research teams working in areas
that lack critical mass at NIMR would be best relocated in MRC
Units or University Departments elsewhere in the UK to create
critical mass and so stimulate early-phase translational research.
23 November 2004
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