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Dexter: in quest for imaginative ideas. Credit: WELLCOME TRUST

High-quality schemes that are both ambitious and imaginative are being sought for a new £600-million fund for research infrastructure being jointly funded by the British government and the Wellcome Trust.

This is the message that both the government and the trust say they want to convey to Britain's scientific community as they open the first call for applications today.

Mike Dexter, director of the Wellcome Trust, argues that a shortage of funds has forced universities to adopt a conservative approach to applying for support. “We want to change this culture of undercutting, where universities write out applications on the basis that the lowest-value bid will get funded.”

Richard Lane, programme director of the fund at the Wellcome Trust, adds: “We want the best science, but not just safe science. In the long-run, cheap does not necessarily mean value for money.”

Dexter says the fund is looking for imaginative, perhaps cross-disciplinary, ideas that may need time to develop and may not lead to an immediate flow of research publications.

The government and the trust will each contribute £300 million to the fund, which was announced in the July budget (see Nature 394, 209; 1998) and will last until 2001. It is designed primarily to purchase equipment and for the construction and refurbishment of laboratories. Bids below £750,000 are unlikely to be considered.

Government officials and trust representatives will embark on a ‘roadshow’ of six universities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland on 9 October, introducing the fund and giving potential applicants a feel for types of projects likely to be funded.

Sir John Cadogan, director general of the research councils, says universities would be wrong to see the fund merely as a way of fixing old equipment, as applications had to be accompanied by plans for “high-level science”.

Cadogan will chair the fund's joint executive committee, the body that will ultimately decide which projects to support. In January he will hand over to his successor, John Taylor, director of Hewlett Packard's European research laboratories in Bristol. Dexter will be the committee's deputy chair.

The committee is made up of government officials, the heads of the research councils, representatives of the Wellcome Trust, and the heads of the four UK higher-education funding councils, who are non-voting members.

Both Cadogan and Dexter believe that more than half of the fund is likely to be allocated to applications with a biological science component, largely because of the trust's legal status as a charity devoted to biomedical research. But they say that there are no quotas for any particular type of research, nor will the fund be divided according to regions.

Lane and Dexter emphasize that the fund will not “in any way” reflect the trust's own research priorities, which are taken care of under separate programmes. It remains unclear at present the extent to which proposals selected for funding will be associated with topics identified as potential priorities in the government's Technology Foresight exercise.

An international scientific advisory board will assess all applications with an emphasis on the biomedical and biological sciences, including environmental science. The board will be chaired by Richard Flavell, professor of immunobiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Its members have yet to be confirmed, but two-thirds are expected to come from outside the United Kingdom.

Existing peer review panels from four research councils — Engineering and Physical Sciences, Particle Physics and Astronomy, Natural Environment, and Economic and Social Research — will assess all other research applications. The international scientific advisory board and the joint executive committee will hold five application rounds between now and 2001.