Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-194)
Professor Richard Battarbee, Professor Richard Gornall
and Dr Alastair Culham
25 MARCH 2008
Q180 Baroness Walmsley: Could you
tell us how accessible is Research Council UK funding for taxonomic
and systematic studies that underpin climate change research?
We have heard from NERC and they say they fund a lot of taxonomists
as part of responsive mode research grants, and they say that
if taxonomy is needed they will pay for it, but it strikes me
as a very patchy way of doing it. We were wondering is this your
experience and, if so, do you think this approach is sustainable
and what impact might it have on the discipline?
Dr Gornall: I looked at the NERC website before
I came and typed in "climate change" and there was a
whole list of the grants that have been awarded in the last ten
years, with climate change somewhere as one of the key words,
and none of them was for taxonomy. Of course, I do not know what
the applications were but it does suggest that taxonomy is not
funded to the extent that it perhaps ought to be. If you however
look at what taxonomic projects they have funded, they all relate
to various aspects of evolution or conservation, none of them
is for what you might regard as alpha taxonomy, that is the writing
of floras or the preparation of monographs, none of them. Of course,
that is because, presumably, that sort of research is not innovative,
certainly, there are no new methods, there is no novelty, it is
derivative and therefore it is unfundable and probably even ineligible
for funding under some criteria. That aspect of taxonomy, what
you might regard as alpha taxonomy, floras and monographs, does
not stand a chance. Yet that is the stuff which people who monitor
the environment, species compositions of floras and so forth,
need; they need these products, the identification keys, the species
descriptions and so forth. It is not being funded in this country
outside major taxonomic institutions I should add.
Dr Culham: I will add a little to that as someone
who has applied to NERC for research funding over the years and
occasionally received some. Taxonomic funding is not built-in,
you cannot get money into taxonomy. The way taxonomy has been
achieved is through building it in as a small part of the larger
projects with sexier titles, through conservation or through climate
change. A positive side effect is that it does encourage taxonomists
to collaborate with other environmental researchers and that is
a very positive side effect; the downside is that the basic funding
is not there to actually do adequate pieces of taxonomic work,
it is simply patching gaps.
Professor Battarbee: Again, coming at it from
the other side that is a perfect answer in a sense because when
we have questions about climate change and its impact upon ecosystems
we are confronted by taxonomic issues immediately, and most of
our community will have those routine taxonomic skills so it is
not important at that particular point. It always becomes a problem,
however, when you are faced by a taxonomic question, a taxonomic
problem, and you then need some professional taxonomic expertise
to resolve that, to make progress, a separation perhaps between
two species that are pretty much the same but might have really
quite different ecological preferences or respond differently
to climate. At that point you then really need to have some professional
expertise to start to say are these two species, how are they
related, can we separate them, do they live and grow in different
environments? What we try to do is move in that direction and
we always depend upon the availability of more expertise in a
university or, more than usually, in the NHM or somewhere like
that. That reservoir of experts is therefore absolutely essential
when that point comes where we need that extra, very high-level
professional skill to separate between specific species. One final
point on that is what we try to do when we are applying for research
money, when we know there is some taxonomic needs involved with
that, we disguise it and we often call it taxonomic quality control
between labs. Just as it is very important in chemistry to be
able to measure things absolutely accurately and to have the same
accurate measurements between laboratories, we transfer samples
and different machines are then used to see if we come up with
the same answers. We can do that with identification of specimens
as well, so we send microscope slides around and people have to
identify them blind so to speak, then we can compare results and
see whether we have consistent approaches to splitting and lumping
in taxonomic divisions. We disguise it because we do not think
it will enhance our research proposal.
Q181 Baroness Walmsley: That seems
terribly sad to me. Can I ask a follow-up question? Professor
Georgina Mace told us that for the purposes of the RAE outputs
are measured not just on their scientific merit but how well they
correlate with policy. Have you noticed that?
Dr Gornall: With whose policy?
Baroness Walmsley: I presume she meant government
policy; it must have been. This might be helpful to taxonomy given
the Government's concentration on the effects of climate change
for example.
Q182 Chairman: If it has not crossed
your horizon then just say so.
Dr Gornall: The way people work at universities
is wonderfully anarchic. To some extent we are market-driven in
that we know what is flavour of the month in terms of the research
councils and what they are likely to be funding, so you will try
and angle your research in that direction and, as Alastair says,
dress up your taxonomic project as something else perhaps. You
really do follow your own nose and you make your collaborations
with other institutions as and when you see fit, so I am not certain
that anybody really pays much attention to government policy other
than as a reaction to where the money comes from.
Q183 Baroness Walmsley: Is it not
government policy that drives the RAE and then therefore that
drives the applications?
Dr Culham: There is another step involved there.
Government policy drives what the research councils will fund
and what research councils will fund governs what grants we can
get and therefore what outputs we can produce, and of course the
quality outputs are what is measured in the RAE. Without funding
we are stuck, but funding does follow government policy in as
much as research council funding, particularly specialist initiatives,
follows that policy.
Dr Gornall: As taxonomists the RAE is an impediment
in a way, we cannot do what we are trained to do to our fullest
capacity. It has to be almost subverted so that it gets incorporated
into another project basically.
Baroness Walmsley: This is all depressingly
familiar having chaired the last report five years ago.
Chairman: And in other areas too. Lord Northesk.
Q184 Earl of Northesk: In written
evidence the BSBI comments that the leading UK systematic research
institutions do not take on a leadership role in the national
context in terms of setting research priorities and facilitating
training. What in your view needs to be done to rectify this?
Dr Gornall: I have to say I found it a rather
loaded question actually, so in my response I said that these
institutions do not take on a leadership role in the UK context,
at least the ones that I am aware of. They all carry out their
roles in these different activities, both in research and in facilitated
training, and they do that as part of their own internal policies
and they do it excellently, but there is not to my knowledge a
national consensus or body that has set any kind of agenda as
it were. These national institutions may collaborate and they
do collaborate with bodies on an ad hoc basis as the need arises,
but I would hesitate to say that there is a leadership role being
taken by any of them and I would actually question, before you
say how do we get one, I would like some sort of forum at which
we could discuss whether we need a leadership role. This relates
back to the co-ordination issue which was discussed earlier; the
presence of yet another body—we should be cautious before
jumping into that one. Having said all that of course there are
areas where a bit more of a co-ordinated approach would be beneficial.
I am hesitant to say at the moment that I would certainly love
to see a leadership role being taken by, say, the likes of Kew
or the Natural History Museum or Edinburgh or whatever.
Q185 Lord Haskel: The regional botanic
gardens and museums we have been told house important collections
but some evidence from the Botanical Society of the British Isles
highlights the widespread transfer of collections to larger institutions,
perhaps for safety but even for destruction of the collections.
What are the drivers, what are the reasons for this?
Dr Gornall: The transfer is to avoid the destruction
of the specimens.
Q186 Chairman: That is a relief.
Dr Gornall: The drivers are largely just the
exigencies of local authority funding because many of these collections
are in local museums, some of these collections are in schools.
In the past many schools actually had or developed herbaria as
part and parcel of the biological education of the students and
nowadays the GCSE and A-level syllabuses have changed to such
an extent that school herbaria in particular are surplus to requirements
and in many cases these have actually just been put in the skip.
I know of one recently which was saved from a rather dank London
basement; it contained some enormously valuable historical material
and I am glad to say that it is now being well cared for at the
University of California in Berkeley, so it had a reprieve and
I hope that we will learn more about the collections that are
in it in due course. The main drivers in schools are the GCSE
and A-level syllabuses which no longer support whole organism
biology to the extent which they used to and therefore the students
no longer collect specimens; in local authorities the driver is
simply one of money. Many museums no longer can afford to have
a zoological curator as well as a botanical curator so one of
them has gone; sometimes the zoological one has stayed and so
the botanical specimens are just put in a box and archived and
nobody ever looks at them. Yet they contain extraordinarily valuable
historical data; it is unpublished but it has been collected by
individuals over 200 or 300 years and it is there in our archives.
The BSBI actually has an initiative at the moment to go around
photographing these specimens, the material is then put up on
the web and members of the public are invited to transcribe the
data so we actually can recall the records. I know this is not
a systematic scientific survey of what was present or not present
in the British Isles 150, 200 years ago, but it is better than
nothing.
Q187 Lord May of Oxford: In so far
as this is going out of syllabuses, do you not think that is likely
to have an impact on the amateur societies that we were talking
about earlier?
Dr Gornall: Absolutely. The children will no
longer be exposed to the enthusiasm and the joy of natural history
and it will just pass them by, they will be lost to us.
Q188 Lord May of Oxford: Are they
falling out because of the prejudice against taking kids outside
the school grounds on health and safety grounds or are they falling
out because they do not seem to be hypothesis-driven science,
or both?
Dr Gornall: My knowledge of the GCSE and A-level
curricula is not brilliant, but I know something about it. A lot
of it seems to be focused on human biology and a lot of it is
bent over backwards to include quite up-to-date science in it
and, given that you have got to have X amount in the syllabus,
you cannot have it all in, to some extent the less fashionable
stuff has been squeezed out. I also question to some extent the
decisions of the people who actually include the topics that they
do include, so speaking with a botanical hat I know from interviewing
students year in year out in my first year biology class when
I ask "What botany did you do at school?" the only thing
they have in common is photosynthesis and they did a little bit
else as well, but it is basically photosynthesis. I cannot think
of a bigger turn-off at that age than the biochemistry of photosynthesis.
Come on people, there is a better way of enthusing our young people
about natural history and the scientific world than reducing plants
to photosynthetic metabolism; they are much more than that. It
is important, I acknowledge, but you get all you need to know
at primary school and you do not actually need to touch it again
until you get to university, there are lots of other really exciting
things that you can do. I am digressing here.
Q189 Chairman: It is very interesting.
Dr Gornall: That is one of the reasons why kids
are not taking it up, botany in particular.
Q190 Lord Haskel: Are you trying
to do something to get this situation reversed, for instance to
get the local museums more involved and this sort of thing?
Dr Gornall: There is a network called the Botanic
Gardens Education Network—this is just about plants of course—but
botanic gardens around the country are trying to address this
problem by having schools programmes. At Leicester we have one
and last year we had over 9,000 kids through the gates where we
did basic biology of plants and evolutionary biology as well,
and the age range was from 5 up to the age of 18, so right across
the primary and secondary school spectrum; but these initiatives
are local, nothing compels a botanic garden or a museum to do
these sorts of things. Where they have an education officer of
course they try, but there is no co-ordinated response, it is
all very ad hoc. The advantage of that is that you can actually
do what you like, there is no set syllabus, although obviously
to get schools to come you have to look at what is on the syllabus
but we try and enrich that by producing material which is on the
syllabus but which we regard as extension work, enrichment work.
It is a problem with the school syllabus.
Q191 Earl of Selborne: We heard that
Defra's Central Science Laboratory houses a bar-coding unit with
a strong focus on plant pathogens, including fungi. The University
of Reading is also active in searching for molecular markers for
fungal pathogens. Are there synergies between academia and the
Central Science Laboratory?
Dr Culham: Another difficult question. Superficially,
yes, there are some synergies; we have links mainly with our plant
pathologists and the CSL but recent experience, again funding
driven, is that a very promising employee at CSL who completed
a PhD on rysoctonia, a disease of cabbages, part-way through her
PhD was then transferred onto a project on bees, to study varroa,
using the same molecular techniques but losing effectively the
taxonomic knowledge she gained on the infective fungi. Both groups
are developing molecular markers, the technology is there and
it is something that most universities have access to. Links are
maintained really by availability of funding, particularly on
PhD projects between CSL and Reading.
Q192 Baroness Walmsley: Dr Culham,
your university, the University of Reading, benefited from the
NERC taxonomy initiative in the 1990s and we know that that left
a real footprint, a real heritage which still survives in your
university and elsewhere. Is it time for another one?
Dr Culham: I was quickly doing some sums as
to where those footprints had taken the people that worked on
that initiative; I was one of the people who received grant money
from that. Of the four post-doctoral research fellows we had one
is now in the Netherlands, one in South Africa, one in Canada
and one in the US because the career paths there were much stronger.
Of the ten PhD students, two are still in the UK, one working
for Kew, and most of the rest are now in the US. In fact, one
of them is curating the herbarium that took on the UK school collection
that Richard referred to.
Lord May of Oxford: Clearly we need a transfer
fee system.
Q193 Baroness Walmsley: Does that
mean that you are saying we would be wasting our money having
another such initiative unless we have career options to keep
them here?
Dr Culham: Yes. Reading hosted what I can only
call the closing conference of the NERC taxonomy initiative and
it was evident certainly three years into the five years of the
initiative that there was no serious intention by the NERC to
fund basic taxonomic research after the end of the initiative.
They were very open about it, the head of NERC at the conference
stood up and said words to that effect and career-minded taxonomists,
of which we developed many during that initiative, felt that they
had seen the writing on the wall and they went to countries where
there was a career in taxonomy. In fact, most of them now have
been promoted well beyond my status at Reading, having trained
many of them. There is a need for another initiative but it must
have core funding to follow it up and there must be a career path
for those people who are trained.
Chairman: Thank you very much, that is very
helpful.
Q194 Lord May of Oxford: That is
tricky; it cannot be dedicated core funding just for that, it
has got to be a vision of science that is more generous and saner
than that which is currently animating NERC.
Dr Culham: Yes, and BBSRC. They need a remit
that should include taxonomy; both of them I have received funding
from over the years but the taxonomy has always been disguised,
there has been no core taxonomy funding, which is different in
other countries.
Chairman: You can see that both sessions this
afternoon have engaged the Committee very firmly and we have responded
as you have responded. Thank you very much again for the written
evidence and may I repeat the offer, that if there are matters
that you would like to clarify further in writing we would be
very happy to hear from you, or if there are points that have
occurred to you because of the session, again we would be very
happy to receive anything in writing that you would like to submit.
Thank you very much for your time and for the interest you have
provoked.
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