APPENDIX 11
Memorandum from Professor Stafford Lightman,
University of Bristol
First I think I should like to point out the
obvious—that NIMR is a unique British centre of research
excellence with a fantastic international reputation. It would
be unthinkable to risk losing this jewel in our crown unless we
had hard, good quality evidence that an alternative was at least
as good if not better. The current situation is simply undermining
NIMR, causing a major distraction for the scientists involved
and a threat to future recruitment. There are several questions
for which I would like to seek answers.
1. What is the true reason for the MRC's
wish to move NIMR and the rationale behind the timing for this?
2. Why is it that the MRC has not listened
to the views of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community?
On both occasions that the community was consulted there was an
overwhelming majority in favour of NIMR remaining at Mill Hill—but
the MRC, rather than listening, seems to feel it knows better.
There is a feeling of a small cabal wanting to impose their will
on the scientific community.
3. Did we really need to pay for expensive
consultants to canvass our views? I don't feel that this canvassing
was helpful in any way and I am amazed that the MRC couldn't have
done it themselves and saved the money and spent it on science!
The key point appears to be the MRC's apparent
emphasis on clinical translation. This is a very laudable aim—but
the MRC show a lamentable lack of insight into the translational
research process. Good translational research comes from the intellectual
links between the best basic and clinical research scientists—who
may be at any institution in the UK. NIMR already has superb links
with clinicians (of their choice) all over the country and have
been working with many young clinical scientists who are grateful
to be out of range of their hospital pagers! It could certainly
be argued that we should increase the numbers of clinicians collaborating
with NIMR—but this could be done in a totally different
way, for instance by creating a special fellowship programme to
attract the very best clinical scientists to spend time at appropriate
departments at Mill Hill. Moving NIMR to a London hospital site
would be likely to reduce rather than increase the number of clinicians
and clinical centres that would collaborate with NIMR and would
thus decrease the potential for high quality collaborative translational
research. I am amazed the MRC haven't learnt from the disasters
they have had at the Clinical Research Centre at Northwick Park
and now the CSC as well. Simply moving Mill Hill into the campus
of a University hospital is actually likely to lower the standards
of research, cause a loss of some of the top scientists to other
centres abroad and only help—to some extent—the particular
institution which houses the new centre and will uniquely benefit
from an infusion of MRC money at the cost to all the other good
translational research centres in the UK.
It is simply not true that independent institutes
cannot collaborate effectively unless they are physically rubbing
shoulders with doctors. Most basic scientists are very keen to
collaborate and to see their ideas put into a clinical setting.
For them to have the widest choice of clinical collaborators is
much more important than rubbing shoulders with people who might
not be the most appropriate co-investigators.
One of the great strengths of Mill Hill has
been its critical mass in interdisciplinary interactions unlike
the emphasis on intra-disciplinary critical mass forced on the
Universities by the RAE process. It is the ability of structural
biologists, bioinformaticists, neuroendocrinologists, parasitologists,
physical biochemists and immunologists (for instance) to communicate
together which really moves things forward. An example in my own
sphere is that a neuroendocrinologist at Mill Hill noticed that
the developmental biologists at the same institution had made
a knock-out mouse which among other things had a neuroanatomical
abnormality with similarities to the human condition of septo-optic
dysplasia. This allowed this neuroendocrinologist to set up a
collaboration with the developmental biologists and trained a
clinician from Great Ormond Street to clone the human gene candidate,
show it was responsible for the human disease, and worked out
how this occurred. What we want to do is to make it easier to
move the bright young doctors and scientists about and mix them
up. This will allow us to spend our time fixing what is, in my
opinion, the real problem—the careers of academic clinical
scientists within the NHS environment.
There are many other examples I could discuss
which result in advances from fields as far apart as memory and
malaria but the true point I want to make is that a move of NIMR
to central London would be likely to reduce these collaborations
and decrease our ability—as a country—to do good translational
research. What we really need to do is to think positively about
how to improve Mill Hill, make it more cost-effective and think
of novel schemes to increase interaction with universities throughout
the British Isles. I should, therefore, like to make three further
points:
1. The cost of moving Mill Hill to a central
London site would be enormous and I am not clear how the MRC will
be able to create a large secure animal facility in a city centre
site. Not only would the move cost a vast amount of money, but
a lot of the scientists would not want to move into a very expensive
part of central London and would be likely to leave—many
of them abroad. I should therefore like to know what are the costs
of the move into central London and how the MRC believes there
are hypothetical benefits that can outweigh them.
2. I would like to suggest that the money
could be far better spent in other ways. Not only could we increase
the number of fellowships for clinicians to go to Mill Hill, but
we could also make modest investments both at Mill Hill and building
late translational facilities in several different hospitals around
the UK (MRC clinical investigation units would be very cost effective),
making the best of the science base at Mill Hill. We could, for
instance, use their transgenic facilities to make animal models
of disease.
3. Finally, I should like to share with
you my great discomfort with the MRC's current approach to serving
the scientific and translational needs of the UK. I believe the
MRC has been introspective, listening only to those it wants to
hear and not responding to the vast majority of biomedical scientists
in the UK for whom funding from the MRC has become an increasingly
distant wish. If this country didn't have the Wellcome Trust and
the BBSRC also supporting our biomedical sciences, we would be
a third world nation in terms of our science with all that would
entail for our industrial base.
8 November 2004
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