Dismantling research in the Natural History Museum of Denmark

The University of Copenhagen is about to dismantle the research programme of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. 

This is a gross mistake. The Natural History Museum is beacon of world-class interdisciplinary research in natural sciences and the plan is to move all research groups to the Biology Department, or to split them among Biology and other departments. Neither the Biology Department nor the Researchers at the Museum are happy, understandably.

The short-term consequence of this decision is the loss of the unique interdisciplinary research environment that currently exists in the Museum and that enables top-research to be addressed at the borders of different disciplines.

The mid-term consequence is the loss of the privileged connection between biological collections at the Museum and the research conducted on them or with them. Science at the Museum does not only benefit from the collections but also feeds them with new data and even new types of data. That connection will be weakened.

The long-term consequence is the most likely loss of world-class research groups and brain drain that comes with it, which would start an almost inevitable decline in the stature of natural history collections at the Museum and the natural history research conducted at the University of Copenhagen.

This is sad news. A new Natural History Museum of Denmark is being built with the vision of merging three independent museums: Botany, Geology and Zoology. The new building was conceived to host natural history collections, research, and exhibitions with obvious synergies being established with each one of these three types activities in the Museum. The whole process of merging of independent museums together with the policy to host large interdisciplinary research centres was the driving force for the construction of the new Museum and the reason why it was often seen as an innovator and source of inspiration by colleagues abroad.

Unfortunately, the decision to dismantle the the research programme of the Natural History Museum supports my reasoning back 2003 when I wrote  about the consequences of Natural History Museums being managed by Universities (Ambio blog; in Portuguese). 

Then, I was referring to another Museum (in Lisbon) but the problems related with universities managing Natural History Museums are general and can be summed up by the all too frequent lack of vision and understanding of the specific needs of museums by top leaders of the universities (they are chosen based on their understanding of the workings of universities not museums), and the low funding priority given by universities to museums when budgets are stretched and other (more central obligations of universities) are at stake. For these reasons, I concluded that museums, when managed by public institutions, should ideally be independent institutions under direct roof of the Ministries of Science, Education and/or Technology.

The Natural History Museum of Denmark was, so far, the example that proved me wrong. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be the case anymore.

Interview with Blog @ National Museum of Natural Sciences of Madrid

See the following blog interview if you want to know more about my views on  several issues of my work, but also on the role of Natural History Museums and their collections, the need for greater collaboration between taxonomists and macroecologists, and issues related to science funding. It is all in Spanish I am afraid...

To give you a bit of a taste for the content:

Pregunta: ¿No existe el riesgo de crear un sistema científico a dos velocidades en el que unos pocos tienen todos los recursos y otros muchos no tienen ninguno?

Respuesta: Sí claro, el "café para todos" puede dar lugar al "café para muy pocos" y eso tampoco es bueno. A partir de un determinado nivel de competitividad es imposible discriminar niveles de calidad y las decisiones de financiación son arbitrarias. Esto ha ocurrido en la primera convocatoria de proyectos de la ERC donde se rechazaron 97% de los proyectos y en la última convocatoria del programa Severo Ochoa donde se han dejado sin financiar centros de investigación evaluados con el 100%. La solución pasa, naturalmente, por ofrecer un nivel de financiación en consonancia con la dimensión y ambición de la masa crítica disponible. Por otro lado, hay que repensar la forma de organizar la ciencia en España de modo que permita la financiación de núcleos competitivos sin condenar a la obsolescencia a los restantes polos de actividad científica. Una posibilidad sería emular el sistema adoptado en algunos países nórdicos como Dinamarca y Finlandia. En estos países se reforzó de forma muy sustancial la financiación de grupos competitivos. Al mismo tiempo se reorganizaron los grupos de investigación. Pequeñas unidades de investigación, generalmente dirigidas por un único investigador principal, se han integrado en unidades de excelencia generosamente financiadas. De este modo, ha sido posible movilizar investigadores con características diferenciadas en la construcción de una agenda científica común, reforzando al mismo tiempo la capacidad de estos países de competir por recursos internacionales competitivos. En España, una política análoga podría dar resultados positivos. De hecho hay mucho margen de mejora ya que, contrariamente a la tendencia internacional que es concentración de masa crítica y de trabajo en red, continuamos teniendo una excesiva atomización de los grupos de investigación.

The hard choices of Carmen Vela

The Spanish science community is in turmoil because Carmen Vela, the Science Secretary, announced in Nature unprecedented budget cuts of 23.5% for the sector. These are of course terrible news. Her rather displaced tone of optimism irritates many, but she is not the person to blame. She simply is the one in charge of managing those shrinking funds. Whoever will manage the Spanish science budget for 2012 will have to make hard choices, and hard choices will obviously not please everyone.

So what hard choices did she announce? Fewer post-doctoral fellowships and more research money for those getting them.

Such a decision is of course debatable.

What I primarily need for my work is brains, not money. But my needs are unlikely to represent the needs of the vast majority of my colleagues. Research money is indeed critical to get going with many projects, and especially important when starting a new research programme as an independent researcher.

Moreover, she has to manage people’s expectations. Many researchers that received the prestigious ‘Ramón y Cajal’ fellowships failed to get a job in Spain. This caused frustration among them, because fellowships were presented as a kind of tenured track position. It was, of course, misleading to present the ‘Ramón y Cajal’ fellowships as a tenured track, and it was naïve to believe this was the case.

So, one of the hard questions the State Secretary will have to address in 2012 is whether to keep increasing the pool of discontent research fellows that have no chance to be assimilated by the system, or attract slightly fewer researchers but give them more resources to undertake research.

These are, of course, short-term management decisions. The long-term challenge will involve turning the system upside down and scrapping the two-tier system that allows some established researchers to do little, while forcing some of the younger best to give up or go elsewhere.