In January 2000, it emerged that in the 1960s, the government of the United Kingdom considered banning foreign job ads for scientists and engineers because it was so worried about losing top people down the brain drain. The idea of treating scientists as some kind of elite group within society was also mooted to help secure better working conditions and pay, and so plug the drain. The ideas were never implemented, and through the 1960s and seventies the U.K. lost many of its top people abroad.

A scientist's standing in society is worse than ever, with dioxin scare-stories and genetic-modification horrors filling countless column inches. British scientists are, to the detriment of the U.K. economy, still gurgling away down that brain drain. The government, however, is now taking a more practical approach to saving British science than its 1960s counterpart did, and measures based on better pay, greater funding, and improved conditions will, it hopes, plug the hole and turn the brain drain into a brain gain.

The pressure group Save British Science (SBS) first revealed the recruitment problems facing top-class universities in the early 1990s. One big-league biology department, for instance, had 15 of 56 postdoctoral positions unfilled. In addition to this and other reports, by April 1997, the U.K.'s governing Labour Party had revealed its plans to create a brain gain, hoping in the first step to attract back top scientists from abroad.

NESTA - the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts - was created to grab some of the proceeds from useful inventions and discoveries and plow money from that and the National Lottery into science as awards and scholarships. Gordon Brown, who holds the government's purse strings as Chancellor of the Exchequer, highlighted letters of support from some 21 respected expatriate scientists who said the measures were important and might ultimately lead them to returning home.

The following year, the U.S. National Science Foundation reported that foreign-born scientists and engineers contributed significantly to the brain power of the U.S. labor force, with immigrant Ph.D.s in science and engineering jobs accounting for some 29 percent of those in R and D. At the time, a feature article in the U.K.'s Times Higher Education Supplement described how medical schools were reaching a crisis point in attempting to recruit top researchers to their clinical chairs. It said that at least 74 of 401 established research positions were vacant at the time. A lack of quality candidates was blamed.

The U.K. government continually reiterates its commitment to halting the brain drain. Speaking at the annual science festival of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in September 2000, Minister for Science Lord Sainsbury posited, rather obviously, that research cannot succeed without people. He said that highly skilled and knowledgeable people are essential if science is to "export" benefit to the rest of the U.K. economy.

Sainsbury also brought up the perennial Labour Party tenet of achieving a brain gain - "We also need to be able to attract the best- established scientists from around the world to work in this country. For too long we have lost out on homegrown talent to high-paying foreign universities and businesses," he told the meeting.

He added that top salaries were needed for top scientists - and to that end, the government, in partnership with the Wolfson Foundation, has established a fund of £4 million per year ($5.8 million) to help recruit about 50 top expatriate researchers with a £100,000 salary ($145,000) and a grant. "U.K. science certainly needs the high flyers, and, in a global market, needs to retain them," Willie Russell of the University of St. Andrews and chair of Scientists for Labour said in Chemistry & Industry magazine in November 2000.

It is not enough in the eyes of some commentators. Roger Gosden, an expat British researcher at McGill University in Canada, is not convinced that creating 50 chairs at the equivalent of a U.S. professorship salary will go far toward saving British science. "It will cause some jealousy in senior common rooms!" he says. Colin Andrew, who did a Ph.D. at Newcastle University in England but now researches metalloproteins at Oregon Graduate Institute, still considers himself a "young" scientist (at 30-something). He would rather be working in the U.K. "Maybe things in the U.K. will improve," he laments, "but I don't think that handing out carrots to established scientists is the way to go. More financial support has to be directed towards younger people." [1]

"Academic life in the U.S. is not a bed of roses," adds Andrew. "Jobs are hard to come by and funding is very competitive," he says, "but if you are able to secure a position, there is more support available."

SBS preempted the government's recent announcements when it pleaded for more science money on the back of a report from senior civil servant Sir Michael Bett, in which he stressed that £450 million ($650 million) was needed to improve academic pay. Almost coinciding with this, Britain's largest medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, gave its senior scientists a record 30 percent salary increase. The top of the salary scale is about £30,000 ($43,500), whereas that is the U.S. average.

An SBS meeting in September 2000 highlighted the tendency among those who say no brain drain exists to use a lack of reliable data and the superficial argument that the raw figures demonstrate the drain is balanced by a gain. However, SBS founder John Mulvey asserts that that attitude ignores a large body of anecdotal evidence of the problems facing U.K. universities. Indeed, the balance argument, he explains, challenges the quantity versus quality question. The evidence points to an overwhelming brain drain in recent years.

The Royal Society (RS) - the U.K.'s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences - keeps statistics on its most distinguished members - its fellows - working abroad. According to the RS, just 16 percent worked abroad in 1969; today, 26 percent do. Is it any surprise with the low salaries, lack of research funds, poor career structure, short-term contracts, and embarrassingly outdated facilities and instrumentation facing many U.K. researchers?

SBS statistics also back up the anecdotes by revealing that scientists who stay in Britain actually fare poorly in the eyes of their peers abroad. SBS researcher Alice Sharp Pierson and director Peter Cotgreave, writing in Nature, used the Institute for Scientific Information's Science Citation Index for 1985-1989 to check the publication records of individuals who had received U.K. Ph.D.s. They found that 157 of 252 scientists still publishing have a U.K. address, 43 are U.S.-based, and 52 are from elsewhere. The mean number of citations per article for those now in the U.S. was far higher, they say.

Phosphorylation expert Sir Philip Cohen of Dundee University tells HMS Beagle how the coming of research to the city changed it from a run-down postindustrial town into a major international research center. The latest estimates suggest that more than 1,500 people are employed in the life sciences in Dundee, bringing in a research income alone of around £50 million ($72.5 million) a year. Cohen's colleague David Lane, however, recently emphasized that the university might lose its status if top researchers abandon ship for better funding elsewhere.

There are some notable exceptions to the qualitative rules that are emerging from the British brain drain. One is Allan Bradley, a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. In October 2000, Bradley took the reins at the Sanger Centre, Cambridge, U.K. The cynical might suggest that, with its massive pulling power, the Wellcome Trust has deliberately employed a high-flying researcher from the States in a further effort of its own to encourage other scientists to the U.K.

Postdoc Boost

"The major problem with U.K. academia is the lack of financial support available for young scientists to get their careers started," says Andrew. "I made the decision to move to the U.S. after several frustrating years in the British university system." He says he encountered job insecurity, inadequate facilities, and a woeful lack of funding.

A whole generation of scientists might depart U.K. shores unless more action is taken to improve the career prospects, status, and pay of researchers. Brain researcher David Nicholls has already announced the defection of his team to the Buck Institute in San Francisco. Nicholls himself will not only receive a doubling in salary but points out that his research team will get a boost too, adding that young scientists in the U.K. get less than supermarket checkout pay but work far longer hours. Charles McGhee, another young scientist, says it would have taken him 20 years to achieve the same level of support staff in the U.K. as he will receive from "day one" in his new position abroad.

At the bench, Britain's 30,000 postdoctoral researchers, mostly in their late twenties and early thirties, are paid a pittance on short-term contracts. What is to keep these people in the U.K. when offers of better salaries and facilities come along? Many excellent young scientists are afraid they will never get a tenure-track job, or when faced with the enormous lectureship workload simply depart for other walks of life. "We should not aim to retain every trainee," explains Gosden, "but the wastage at the moment is serious and would never be tolerated by the professions." Andrew adds: "It was very clear to me that while there were U.K. jobs around, the facilities and funds would not enable me to do what was being asked - i.e., conduct world-class research."

John Cowell, chair of the Department of Cancer Genetics at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, has been in the U.S. for some years and senses that the same problems still exist in the U.K. as when he left. "In the USA, everyone has the same chance, which makes getting grant funding easy for good science," he says. "This is also the mood for postdocs from the U.K. who come through my lab who declare that returning to U.K. academia would be hard."

Sainsbury, however, revealed at the BAAS meeting that postgraduate researchers are to receive a substantial three-year financial boost. Graduate researchers can expect £9,000 ($13,000) rather than the present £6,800 ($10,000) by 2003-2004, he revealed; they are still checkout wages, though. "Not enough is said about the problems of junior researchers - especially postdocs - who have been used as cheap labor for many years," adds Gosden. "It is very pleasing to see the U.K. is improving their income. But, what is really needed is a radical restructuring of academia to create more security - or at least some hope of it - at the early stages of a career."

New union activity in the U.S. is starting to make the voices of young scientists heard. There is no very visible unionizing going on yet in the U.K., although Gosden suspects that if, like vets, lawyers, and other professionals, scientists had some group power behind them things might be different in terms of retaining scientists on decent pay and conditions: "If scientists had an equivalent professional body to look after the interests of members we might see some progress," he says, "now there's a campaign that's worth fighting for!"

Of course, research is disseminated internationally, scientists meet around the world, and foreign sabbaticals are common. "Scientists work and think internationally these days," says Gosden, "family ties apart, it matters less which country we work in than the facilities and prestige of the institution." Most scientists would likely up-bench and move to the best facility and package offered to them. Russell told HMS Beagle: "We can only hope that somebody will wake up to the problem before it is too late."