Sir

The article by Wennerås and Wold (Nature 387 341–343; 1997), containing clear proof of nepotism in a funding body, is fascinating.

Ihave had many discussions with contemporaries and colleagues about the way in which decisions are made by the major UK funding bodies, and there is general agreement that the system is seriously flawed.

Everyone has stories about autocratic committee chairmen with whom no one dares to disagree, referees with a study competitive to that of the applicant, committee members who take up ideas for their own groups a year or two after the originator's application was turned down, and committees where more than half the grants under discussion were awarded to members of the committee.

More recently, in Europe, I heard of two European Commission contracts awarded to a group that had been removed from its own national register because of poor performance and no publications. Of course, no one has had, until recently (see D. F. Horrobin, The Lancet, 348, 1293-1295; 1996), any good idea how the system might be changed to avoid lack of objectivity, bias and the unfair apportioning of huge sums of money, often repeatedly.

I have been involved in making grant applications to the major funding bodies since the mid-1960s. In all that time, it was until recently never necessary to object to fair or even relatively unfair criticism. However, I wrote last year to one of the major funding bodies about the careless way in which our application was both refereed and subsequently dealt with by the committee. It was not prompted by sour grapes but by the indisputably incorrect statements made in their letter of rejection.

My letter was designed, first, to explain how much more helpful it would be to those of us ‘on the other side’ to receive feedback before the committee meeting that decides our scientific futures. Grant applications are dealt with in this way by at least one major UK funding body. Secondly, I wished to point out the extent to which the outcome can be substantially affected by luck and by objectivity (or lack of it) from both referees and committee members.

The unsatisfactory reply that I received contained the comment: “You are free, of course, to submit a fresh application if that is substantially different from this one.” Given that the reasons for turning down the application could not be discussed, are we to play some sort of guessing game as to how our “important study” (the committee's words) should be redesigned? If I am to go by the referees' reports, then very little needs to be altered. Am I therefore to take a stab at suggesting something completely different which is trendy and of academic interest but may not improve the welfare of patients to the extent that I believe our present protocol may do?

This is a difficult and dispiriting situation, which erodes research time, thinking time and confidence. It is not surprising that nothing will induce many graduate students (male or female) to take up scientific research as a career these days.

Sir — The research that Wennerås and Wold have been able to do and therefore the issues they raise are crucially dependent on the Swedish commitment to freedom of information. The findings, however, are of relevance to the global research community.

In the British case, our pathological love of secrecy means that it is simply impossible to monitor equity of treatment, either in the procedures for the allocation of grants or in the recognition of scientific excellence. Bodies from the research councils to the Royal Society should find this study food for thought, as they, like the judiciary, are institutions where pale males have been for too long chosen to overrepresent themselves for the health of either science or society.

For that matter, Nature's innovatory footnote drawing attention to the gender of the three referees was itself both smug and sexist. A more worthy reaction would have been for Nature to concentrate first on the possibility of a beam in its own eye. In the same issue, your account of the “Science Wars” (Nature 387, 331–335) manages to erase the fact that Gross and Levitt had attacked, most vitriolically and extensively, the feminist critics of science. Indeed, as I recall their book, the single most attacked person was the distinguished US philosopher of science Sandra Harding. By focusing exclusively on the fights between the boys, Nature managed to make even the “Science Wars” another pale male story.

Is it any wonder that some of us think that the tide is rather unlikely to turn?