Science Media Centre

Decisions on where to invest more public money in research are “political”,  says the head of the national science academy, Dr Garth Carnaby. As president of the Royal Society, he had tried to set out for politicians the different “value propositions” for public intervention in alternative areas. “There are a wide range of views in [...]

On Thursday the government will announce their 2011 budget for New Zealand. The New Zealand Herald‘s Hamish Fletcher caught up with some of the R&D sector’s major players to get an idea of what the budget might hold for Kiwi high-tech research. An excerpt (read in full here): Budget 2011: Little hope of R&D increase [...]

Airing a range of ideas on how to move the New Zealand science system forwards, prominent speakers gathered today in Wellington for the 2010 conference of New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS). ‘Re-setting science and innovation for the next 20 years’ was the theme of the one-day event, co-hosted with the Institute of Policy Studies, [...]

Shaun Hendy writes in an opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald about the strategy of ‘picking winners’ in science funding, and how continued science funding shows diminishing returns in knowledge gain over time. He proposes that this can be offset by investment in infrastructure and research networks. An excerpt: (read in full here) “This [...]

The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology has announced the recipients of this year’s largest science funding round. 42 contracts are being awarded a total of $48 million – the contractors are made up of 18 Crown research institutes, universities and private sector research organisations. An excerpt: (read in full here) “The foundation is an [...]

Dominion Post writer Jon Morgan on the financial returns required of publicly-funded scientific institutions. Read in full here. An excerpt: “…how can you calculate a payback on animal welfare research? In a strictly financial sense, the research is valueless until an export market says, ‘We don’t like your animal welfare standards’, and then the economic [...]

Dr Peter Agre, 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and who the Science Media Centre caught up with in June, says funding and politics in the US are hurting a field critical to solving world crises. You can read the article in full here. Some excerpts: “In the last eight years, science has [...]