Health research funders should take more account of impact on patients

Almost every major advance that has been made in medical science in the last 30 years, was done so by people not intending, or funded to make that advance. CRISPR, RNAi, restriction enzymes, the cell cycle, stem cells ... in each of these cases that have revolutionized our ability to treatment important medical conditions, researchers were doing excellent, but non-medically targeted research. Even where research is targeted at one medical area, the advances are often turn out to be more relevant to another: the latest big thing in cancer treatment (immuno-theapy), comes out of immunology research rather than oncology. Thus it is often not possible for research funders to assess the equality implications of research as the implications of research are unknowable until the research is complete. Even the existing pushes forces scientists who are excellent in one area to do mediocre research in another. How many grants are worst because they force basic biologists to pretend they are trying to cure a specific disease, when that's really just a ruse to get money to do basic research - the result being that the average quality of both disease specific and basic research is worst - its funny how every gene is suddenly of great import to cancer when grants are being written. Average scores in REF tell us nothing, because the score is always relative to the field. If the general quality of work is poorer in one field than another, then "world-leading" means something different. Even where this is not the case, in the system at the moment, the research that is pursued is assessed to be excellent, and so you wouldn't see an effect until you chose non-excellent projects in a priority area over excellent ones in a non-priority area.

In 2014 Wellcome backed research called “What’s it worth?” Investigated returns from the £15bn invested in cancer between 1970 and 2009. This stated that of the 10% return 65% of the benefit of all interventions came from smoking cessation and 24% from cervical screening. That is all behavioural. Including breast screening that means the return on the biomedical element was less than 1%.