George Osborne’s commitment to protect the science budget in real terms has been welcomed by many in the research community. But a lot of the detail is still to emerge. We’ve gathered a few reactions from scientists and policy experts.

Spending decisions ignore evidence in favour of politics, as the horsetrading over plans to slash budgets for scientific research showsOn the clock counting down to George Osborne’s spending statement on 25 November, it’s five to midnight. The most goody two-shoes departments settled with the Treasury first. They include communities and local government, leaving councils in England to infer that if the department can lop off a third of its budget for staffing and buildings, prospects for its grant to councils are grim.Elsewhere in Whitehall, until this weekend, the line has been defiantly “it’s not over till it’s over”. The Paris killings have reverberated around the Home Office and the Foreign Office but Osborne has now confirmed that all departments have settled their spending plans. What’s clear in this spending round is that, yet again, it’s every department for itself. To meet the Treasury’s demand for cuts, departments are playing beggar my neighbour and its latest variant, shoving the costs onto households and business – by turning tax credits for research and development into loans, for example. Continue reading...

The spread of intensive farming in the developing world means were are picking a fight with evolution. This is one we are bound to loseAntibiotic resistance may not seem as urgent as terrorism or the NHS funding shortfall. But it is actually a threat that could kill many more people and degrade the quality of civilised life much more. Chinese scientists have discovered a gene in bacteria that conveys resistance to colistin, a drug presently used in humans when other antibiotics won’t work but also used on a large scale in pig farms. It’s bad enough that such a gene has emerged – and will obviously be favoured by natural selection. What’s worse is that it’s found in a plasmid, a ring of DNA that can be passed directly between different strains of bacteria as well as being simply inherited. Just as we can catch infections from other people, the bacteria that cause them can now transmit to each other an immunity to our countermeasure.The new mutation is only found in one (large) class of dangerous bacteria and it only confers resistance to one particular antibiotic. But when that is the drug of last resort it’s frightening, and the overuse of antibiotics makes it almost certain that similar mutations will emerge, and spread, in other bacterial populations. The crisis is not just caused by human overprescription. The use of antibiotics in agriculture is a much greater scandal still. Animals are routinely dosed so that they can tolerate the overcrowding essential to factory farming. This is not only cruel but enormously shortsighted. The populations of food animals in south-east Asia provide a reservoir of infection for humans: we see this in the successive waves of flu that originate among the ducks and chickens there and then spread round the world. As more of the world eats more meat, farming will become more economically efficient, which is to say more cruel and more dependent on routine antibiotic dosage. This is a global problem and it will become a global health crisis, too. Continue reading...

Under NHS England proposals, patients will be given drugs normally too expensive for the NHS while data is collected to establish their valueNew cancer drugs that show promise but are too expensive for the NHS could be made available to patients for two years to collect data on their value, NHS England has proposed.The plans, which now go out to consultation, are an attempt to solve a thorny ethical and political issue that has provoked damaging headlines for governments for many years. Continue reading...