Dominic Cummings would like to see more long-term research Leon Neal/Getty Images
Dominic Cummings, adviser to the UK prime minister Boris Johnson, met academics at 10 Downing Street to discuss setting up a UK version of the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) that would tackle “really big societal challenges”.
Cummings has been keen on the idea for some time. Writing on his blog in 2017, he said that as the UK prepares to exit the European Union it “should think hard” about the example of ARPA and “how a small group of people can make a huge breakthrough with little money but the right structure”.
An aspiration to create a UK version “broadly modelled” on the research agency subsequently appeared in the Queen’s speech in October, though details weren’t made public.
Advertisement
Now the ambitions and scope of the agency have been revealed in documents released under Freedom of Information rules to New Scientist.
They show that the proposed new agency would back researchers working in any new and emerging fields with a high risk of failure and where the outcomes are uncertain.
“Our proposal is that a new body, offering academics longer term funding (spanning at least 10 years) to tackle significant societal challenges – problems or opportunities – could help do this and strengthen the UK’s global reputation,” officials write in a discussion paper on a UK ARPA.
The agency would be a plank of the UK’s aspiration to become a “science superpower”, they add.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) invited academics to a meeting at 10 Downing Street on 25 September to discuss plans for the agency. Cummings was present at the meeting, people who attended told New Scientist.
Business minister Andrea Leadsom and science minister Chris Skidmore also attended, though the list of academics at the meeting is redacted, as are many of the documents released by BEIS under the FOI request.
The mooted agency wouldn’t have set areas of research focus, but existing UK work on quantum computing and molecular biology are cited as examples of the sort of research that could be funded. The emphasis is placed on long-term funding, up to 15 years, for basic research that is “far from the market” and has a higher risk of failure.
Under the UK’s current system of research funding, which is channelled through the body UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), officials say there is a danger of work falling foul of short-termism and politics.
“Spending through UKRI is linked to annual planning cycles, and major commitments may get caught between government spending periods. This can make planning long-term research programmes more challenging,” the discussion paper says.
However, researchers questioned the need for a new research agency and said its goals could be achieved through existing institutions, with more money.
“The ambitions are all sensible and laudable,” says James Wilsdon at the University of Sheffield. “The thing I find bizarre is the focus on creating a new institution. There is nothing in there [on the UK ARPA proposals] that cannot be achieved in the existing situation with UKRI.”
Wilsdon added that he feared energy and time would be sucked into creating a UK ARPA, making it feel “like a displacement activity” rather than just making existing research channels work better. UK research funding has already undergone a recent big overhaul, with the creation of UKRI in 2018.
ARPA was founded in 1958 and helped create ARPANET, an early version of the internet. It was later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and now focuses on developing new technology for the US military.
Though the documents show plans for a UK ARPA have advanced from ideas sketched on Cumming’s blog to concrete proposals discussed in Downing Street, they could be scrapped in the event of the Conservatives failing to win a majority in tomorrow’s election.
Topics:
