sydney

Woolridge: no magic, just a review. Credit: PETER POCKLEY

The Australian government has responded to intense lobbying against a large cut in funds for medical research, forecast in the May 1997 budget, by setting up the country's first ‘strategic’ review of health and medical research in 20 years.

The health minister, Michael Wooldridge, last week appointed 13 leading researchers, including three international experts, to an independent panel charged with identifying likely future developments, advising on how “to ensure a continuing research capacity in Australia matched to need” and developing an economic framework to achieve this.

Wooldridge says “there is no magic pudding” for research money, but that he was motivated “to take stock” by worries about career prospects for young researchers and the “major squeeze” on medical research.

The panel is chaired by Peter Wills, a businessman who also chairs the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney. The panel has a budget of A$1 million (US$670,000) and will report by the end of the year. Wills aims “to demonstrate that money put into research is an investment, through, for example, developing better preventive techniques to defray health-care costs”.

Peter Doherty, an Australian expatriate and a 1996 Nobel prizewinner, played a key role in the lobbying. Speaking from Memphis, Tennessee, he welcomed the latest move as “putting the subject clearly on the political agenda”. Contrasting Australia's approach with recent US funding increases, he says: “The Australian national effort is, at best, in a holding pattern. Basic research and infrastructure are underfunded.”