Budget threatens Max-Planck closures

in the planning of experiments. " We need to develop ways of better training researchers in methodology to avoid this, " he said. Sir David Weatherall, founding director of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University, said: " For medicine it's a way of life to be supported by the pharmaceutical industry. If you've been looked after by these people, unconscious bias is dangerous. " He said that universities had to wake up to the issues and ensure they had had proper systems in place to monitor funding streams coming into departments from industry and government. " There are problems – perhaps it's inevitable as things have moved so fast in the past five years and it's now time to stand back and deal with them. " In spite of increasing government funds for research over recent years, industry funding is also increasing. It was reported last month that the Wellcome Trust Biocentre at Dundee University had won one of the biggest ever industrial research deals worth £15 million over the next five years from Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Zeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim and Merck to support research on protein phosphorylation. Such projects come at a time of increasing problems for non-industrial funding agencies. The meeting considered a register of interests might help but Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, said that this might be too intrusive. " If there's a scientist just carrying out his or her normal business and occasionally they receive grants from different companies, I don't think that in any way means they are beholden to those companies or biased. " He supported concerns raised by Professor Bateson but valued the energizing effect of commercial partnerships. " What we mustn't lose sight of is the tremendous excitement that arises from working at the coalface of research but at the same time finding there are real-world applications for what you are doing, " he said. Four months into the new year, German funding agencies including the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Max-Planck society (MPG) are still unable to finalize their budget for 2003. Last November, the federal government announced a budget freeze (Current Biology 13, R43), but this decision, which is in contradiction to pre-election promises of a 3% increase, has so far failed to find the approval of the committee of federal and Länder governments (Bund-Länder-Kommission, BLK), which convened twice without coming to an agreement. …