The UK government announced last week that genetics researchers will receive extra funding of £110 million over the next three years. Genomics receives so much of the £725m cash injection for British science because of the potential scope it offers, according to the Government's science budget document. The money is intended to start the process of turning the knowledge acquired through genome research into benefits such as new diagnostic tests, vaccines, drugs and agricultural products.
Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) has increased its support for genomics resource centres and large-scale genomics research, reports last week's Nature. The move is a response to scientists' complaints that EU money is spread too thinly and fails to support key resource centres such as the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge. The changes to the EU's fifth Framework programme of research include an extra 25 million euros ($21 million) for 'genomic and proteomic databases and repositories of suitable animal models'.
The commission hopes that its sixth Framework programme will abandon the funding of individual projects altogether, focussing instead on large-scale, integrated initiatives. 'It sounds wonderful' says Hans Lehrach, of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. 'But it seems a slow procedure - in the meantime a post-genomic Celera-2 could have come in and swept away all the rewards'.
Sources and References
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Europe boosts genome resource centres
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£110m for genetic research
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Researchers get ?ú110m to exploit results of the genome project
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Science budget 2001-2002 to 2003-2004
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