The Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)has joined other Research Councils in deciding to raise its PhD stipends by more than the government minimum. Starting this October, current and new students will receive £8500 per year, up from £7380. Students in London will continue to receive an additional weighting allowance. The announcement follows March's news that Medical Res...
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PhD students sponsored by the Medical Research Council (MRC) are to see their stipends rise to £10,000 a year, beginning in October 2001. The decision to introduce the 34% pay rise has been taken following a review of MRC's training policy. It beats by 2 years and £1000 the stipend increase for all Research Council studentships announced by the Government last summer. Following the 2000 Governmen...
Being an early career scientist in the UK today certainly isn't all doom and gloom. But it ain't a bed of roses either. Eavesdrop in any university science department coffee room and there's a good chance you'll hear a bunch of postdocs and PhD students putting the scientific establishment to rights. Trouble is, although you might feel better after a good whinge - for all of five minutes - it doe...
Writing a superior chemistry thesis is becoming more profitable all the time: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is now offering US$1000 and an all-expense-paid trip to Australia to up to four outstanding chemistry graduates. Any young chemist who completed their Ph.D. in 1999 is eligible to submit a 1000-word essay describing their work to IUPAC by 1 April 2000. The ne...
The Department of Trade and Industry's Promoting SET for Women Unit in the Office of Science and Technology has launched a new Web site that attempts to bring together all the statistics currently available on UK women in science, engineering and technology (SET). The unit has already gathered statistics on the numbers and percentages of women active in science at various stages of education and ...
The Federation of European Chemical Societies (FECS) launched the European Network for Chemistry (ENC) at the end of February to improve virtual communication between European chemists. Although it is not yet fully developed, the FECS hopes the new site will eventually link every European chemist. According to Paul Curnow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the aim is to "enhance the way [chemists...
What does white signify for you? Innocence? Goodness? Why is it, then, that even the wickedest of scientists is always dressed in a lab coat as pure as the driven snow? In fact, why is white the universal colour for lab coats anyway? It always seemed illogical to me--I mean, didn't your mother warn you that white just shows the dirt? What were the mothers of these evil scientists thinking? Well, ...
Ludicrously low salaries, job insecurity, and the allure of sexy alternatives are leading UK scientists to beat a hasty retreat from the hallowed halls of academe. That is the conclusion recently drawn from research published by Save British Science (SBS). "The issue of university staffing in science and technology is now in danger of reaching crisis point," according to Ian Haines, chair of the ...
As scientists-turned-journalists, Next Wave's editors and writers are often asked by readers we meet when we're out and about how we got our jobs. Maybe that's because journalism is the job that most readily springs to mind when a researcher who enjoys writing and communicating begins to think about careers away from the bench. But there are many other roles in which you can combine your scientif...
Trade unions. Depending on your age and political leanings, these words might conjure up images of the Tolpuddle martyrs, Jarrow marchers, or flying pickets; staunch defenders of workers rights or dangerous reactionaries threatening the country's future economic growth. The unions associated with school teachers, nurses, and miners certainly have the highest profiles, but a number of unions repre...
British biomedical scientists who carry out research using animals welcomed a 'sea change' in the attitude of policy-makers and the public to their work last week. Eighteen months ago more than 100 researchers sent an open letter to Science Minister Lord Sainsbury warning that increasing bureaucracy in the granting of project licences was hampering their ability to do research in the UK. High-pro...
Last week Lizzie Burns watched the world première of her first play. The 50-seater Burton Taylor Theatre in Oxford may not be as glamorous a location as the National or London's West End, but for Burns, a postdoc in the University's department of biochemistry, it was an exciting moment nonetheless. Autodestruct begins in 1972 when 25-year-old lab technician John is told he is dying from an inheri...
Never heard of pharmacoeconomics? Neither had most of the Next Wave staff. But that was before GlaxoWellcome's flu drug Relenza hit the headlines last October. A recently established UK government advisory body, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), issued guidance that Relenza should not be prescribed through the National Health Service because it had yet to prove its cost-effec...
BACK TO INDUSTRY INSIDER As this month's Industry Insider feature shows, catalysis, and the development of better and better catalysts, are extremely important to science-based industry. So perhaps it's not surprising that this seems to be one area where academia and industry are very keen to co-operate. This month's Industry Insider resources page focuses on some of the European and national ini...
Normally, I wouldn't review something that is 5 years old, but I've only just come across "Scientists in Business," and it is fab! This CD-ROM aims to give undergraduate and postgraduate students from all branches of science an insight into science-based industry. And I think it succeeds. With bells on. I have to confess that I was rather sceptical as I loaded up my e-drive. Despite working for a...
Last year the Wellcome Trust published two studies that looked at trust-funded PhD students' career paths and levels of satisfaction with their training. In an interview with Next Wave, Patricia Chisholm, programme manager in the trust's career development section, promised that supervisors, too, would be asked for their opinions on the PhD experience at the beginning of the 21st century. Now, th...
Red tape is threatening to strangle the biomedical research community, according to 110 leading academic researchers who sent an open letter this week to Minister for Science Lord Sainsbury, calling for action to salvage Britain's international research standing. The letter argues that delays of up to 9 months to get permission to carry out research using animals is damaging the international com...
Ph.D. students funded by the Wellcome Trust may be well paid, but they are sceptical of the long-term professional value of current research training, say researchers at the Wellcome Trust in two reports published earlier this month. Next Wave spoke to Patricia Chisholm, scientific programme manager in the Trust's Career Development Section, about their findings. The first report, The Student Per...
