T he horse-drawn Victorian hearse canters past London's Houses of Parliament and round Parliament Square before trotting smartly down Whitehall. Straggling behind it comes an eclectic mix of scientists, ranging from students with body piercings to tweedjacketed professors. The spectacle makes an odd addition to the spring afternoon traffic, bringing to mind an elegant, if unusual, state funeral. The truth, however, is much stranger. "We're protesting, " explains one PhD student to a puzzled tourist, "against our research funder. " That funder is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the government body that holds the biggest public purse for physics, mathematics and engineering research in the United Kingdom. Facing a growing cash squeeze and pressure from the government to demonstrate the economic benefits of research, in 2009 the council's chief executive, David Delpy, embarked on
Join the discussion of Futures in Nature at go.nature.com/QMAm2a JACEY Ananyo Bhattacharya I conceived then that, irrespective of the brutal history of our species and the multifarious dark, disturbing truths revealed to us in the natural sciences by studies of the human mind and instincts, the world was perfectible. Not through a long, desperate and tenacious struggle against our own fell natures but simply because a large enough number of well-intentioned folk wished it to be.
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