Government policy is hurting creativity say Nobel Laureates
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
A clutch of Nobel Laureates believe that directing government research funding to projects that are expected to produce economic benefits is misguided. The UK's switch in the 1970s to more targeted research funding, for example, correlated with a decline 20 years later in the number of prizes that the country won. The big advances in science, and resultant economic benefit, come from discoveries that cannot be predicted, claim Sir Tim Hunt, Sir Aaron Klug and others, in a letter to the Financial Times (June 24th, p 14).