Patrick Vallance has warned that ¡°curiosity-driven¡± research is one of the ¡°easiest¡± areas for governments to cut, but stressed it must be ¡°protected and grown¡± alongside improving the UK¡¯s ¡°applied research¡± base.

Speaking after the recent UK government spending review allocated research and development?, Vallance, the minister for science, said that the government needs to ensure that ¡°we [are] allocating funding in the right way¡±.

He told the Metascience 2025 conference at UCL that governments ¡°need to understand¡± how science and research ¡°supports national resilience and defence and security¡±.

¡°Are our institutions actually set up to maximise the creativity and productivity of talented researchers? Fundamentally, is research and development in the UK doing the job that we need it to do?¡±

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But this can only be established by having clear ¡°priorities for science¡±, he said, adding that ¡°curiosity-driven¡± research should be a priority to spark future developments.

¡°We must protect and grow, as the economy allows it to, the funding for basic curiosity-driven,?often investigator-led, research. That is the thing that is the foundation of everything else.

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¡°And the worry is that it often doesn¡¯t seem accessible to people, and it doesn¡¯t seem accessible necessarily to governments. It¡¯s the easiest thing to cut because you don¡¯t feel it for a long time. But if you do cut it, it¡¯s the thing that leaves you with a very big problem in 10, 20, 30 years¡¯ time.¡±

The UK also needs to focus on improving its ¡°applied research¡± which ¡°tackles the problems that society has, that government has, and that citizens have¡±, Vallance said.

Researchers should be ¡°very clear¡± what they are trying to get out of that research. ¡°What is it you¡¯re trying to solve? What are the problems you¡¯re trying to understand?¡±

There additionally needs to be greater consideration of how the private sector can ¡°really become innovative and grow the businesses that need to be there in order to solve the problems¡±.

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This requires, he said, funding for the companies to be founded, grown, and ¡°supported¡± that focus on science and technology.?

The UK is the only country to have an in-house Metascience Unit sitting within government,?which analyses the effectiveness of scientific research.

Vallance used his speech to announce the launch of a ¡°global challenge¡± competition with a prize of ?300,000 to ¡°find the best AI-driven indicators of scientific novelty when assessing scientific papers, and to validate those indicators against human expert judgements of scientific novelty¡±.

He told the audience: ¡°I don't think it¡¯s really possible to overstate how vital public R&D funding is and all it has achieved.¡±

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Citing the development of last year¡¯s malaria vaccine and the UK¡¯s most powerful supercomputer at the University of Bristol, he said ¡°many of these started with something unrelated to those outcomes, but simple curiosity¡±.

¡°As science moves forward, the way we conduct it must also move forward. We can¡¯t build a new world simply with old tools. So, as we continue to use the scientific method to solve challenges, we must continue to be our own best test objects and apply it to ourselves.¡±

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juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com