Personal Review - Andrew McMichael

I joined the RGC at its inception at the invitation of Sir David Todd and Sir Colin Dollery and until 1995/6 chaired the Biology and Medicine panel. This review gives a personal perspective with particular reference to Biology and Medicine research in Hong Kong.

Overall funding structure:

When I joined the RGC the hand-over agreement was quite recent and there was something of a crisis of morale in the Universities and Polytechnics. Many staff were unsettled and it was not uncommon to award a grant only for the PI to leave a few months later. On the other hand, UST was opening as were new buildings at the Polytechnics and the RGC had been set up with the aim of providing a research environment to attract high quality teaching staff to all of the institutions of higher education. This was an unusual concept to one coming from the UK, where the government was in the midst of redistributing funding for Universities, trying to make research funding more accountable (but appearing to reduce support). The new Hong Kong model looked very like the old UK dual support system.

The current Hong Kong model retains these features with considerable research money coming through the Universities and the RGC grants contributing to only a proportion of the total research activity. While this may appear good for the Universities, it has the effect of distributing the available funds rather thinly, as does the RGC policy of trying to fund as many research projects as possible. In an European/North American context, the RGC would be unique in awarding grants to 40% of applicants, funding agencies in the UK can only fund 15-25% of applicants.

The policy of funding as many grants as possible leads to a culture of small grants and short-term support. The average grant from the Biomedicine panel is around HK$700k, equivalent to £60k, for two years. The average project grant in the UK is around £150k for three years. There are also a substantial 5-year Programme grants worth between £0.5m and £2m. In Hong Kong, there are further research funds (from the recurrent grant) available to PIs to supplement grants, including some of those that were not funded. This is now very rare in the UK where almost everything comes off the grant except for the PI's salary. The UK and HK funding systems are therefore quite different, making comparisons difficult.

Charitable and private sources make substantial contributions in Hong Kong, particularly for medical research. The Croucher Foundation has switched from grant support to personal support and the Jockey Club supports the research infrastructure with generous grants for Buildings in particular. There is support some private individuals. The result is substantial funding of new buildings, also enhanced by strong support from the UGC. Overall, the hardware infrastructure is outstanding, many new fine buildings and very well equipped laboratories.

Recent changes:

Over the last nine years there have been striking changes in the Hong Kong research environment. The infrastructure has improved remarkably. In addition to the new HKUST, PolyU and CityU buildings, there are new institutes at the other Universities and more to come. This is an ongoing process and Hong Kong must be developing into one of the best equipped biomedical research sites in Asia.

There has been large scale recruitment of staff with many new lecturers and Professors with very strong research records. Many have returned from the USA and Europe. Far fewer are leaving. The research infrastructure ultimately depends on the quality of people and at Professorial and lecturer levels this is high. In addition, there are clearly excellent graduate students, always impressive on the site visits. Compared to the UK they are very well funded.

Until recently there was a serious gap at the post-doc level and this was reflected by an uncertainty amongst the students about how to develop a career in research. Some Universities and Croucher are now offering Post-doctoral fellowships and this should be further encouraged. Protected research time is vital for the young scientists. This may lessen the tendency of the best PhDs to go the USA, Europe or Australia or better still enable some to return. Many more would, if there was a better-defined research career structure. The potential talent abroad is huge, especially if one adds in the mainland Chinese expatriates. Almost every Cell, Nature, Science paper in biomedicine has one or more Chinese names amongst the authors. Those I know want to go back to China eventually but will wait till the environment is right. Hong Kong has the potential to attract the best.

The Application Process

The Research Grants Council has set up an excellent system for assessing and funding research across the board. The annual round of applications and their processing is one of the most efficient and rigorous I know. The Office does a superb and amazing job managing the process and meeting the deadlines. The application form works well with enough space for applicants to make a strong case, although many applicants still tend to list methods in the Research Plan, rather than develop a strategic plan. The review by five external assessors is ideal and the transparent feed-back is better than most other systems I have seen.

My only criticism is the time it takes for an applicant to submit, hear the decision and start the project -- at least a year. Worse, if the application fails he/she is allowed to apply again, but that takes a further year. Thus it can take two years to get funding, by which time the applicant will either be non-competitive or, if lucky will have done the experiment anyway, and will be moving on to the next step. This slow process must impair international competitiveness. It is partly ameliorated by the internal University funding but perpetuates the need for that.

Can this be improved? One possibility would be to make better use of the New Year meeting to assess some applications. One model would be to have two deadlines for submission and two award dates. If this were adopted, steps would have to be taken to ensure that each panel did not simply double its workload; ideally this should remain the same but be better spread. This could be achieved by allowing only one application per PI per year, with the exception of grants that had a soluble problem identified at one meeting; these could be resubmitted at the next and seen quickly by the same reviewers. This would be quite a major reform and it would be vital not to increase the annual work-load of the Office as well as the panel members.

The assessment of ongoing and completed projects is not working very well, in my view. For the panel member it is hard to get very excited about this. The annual review seems to be an unnecessary burden on his/her time because it has so little impact - by the time the report is reviewed it is too late to stop a failing project and too early to assess excellence. The final report comes out some time after completion of the grant but seems to serve little purpose. PI's who receive an excellent rating (now discontinued) would I suspect much rather have their next application funded in full. Sanctions against those who are rated unsatisfactory are almost impossible; in effect the only sanction that matters is rejection of the next grant on grounds of poor track record.

The assessor, in my case at least, finds it hard to complete the final reports because there is no deadline and varying criteria for the grading -- around 90% receiving the same grade. (I know that I am probably one of the worst offenders in late response to requests for these assessments). My suggestion would be to make the assessment part of the review process for the next grant. There is now a place on the form for the applicant to report on current and recent RGC funding. Why not ask reviewers and panel members to score these as part of a more formal judgement of track record? This would add little burden on the panel member, would involve the reviewers and would be far more efficient. These scores could be fed back to whoever wishes to see them, duly processed and analysed by the Office.

Long-term support and building of teams:

In my view, the main obstacles to turning Hong Kong into a truly international leader in Research (in BioMedicine at least) is the difficulty in funding for the long term and establishing post-doctoral fellows as the engine of the research machine. The building and equipment infrastructure, as I have indicated above, is superb and the talent is here and also waiting to come in. If at all possible, there should be a move to long term support to individual research leaders, five year rolling programme grants that support teams of perhaps 6-8 scientists, several of whom would be post-docs. These grants might cost in the region of $10m for 5 years or $2m per year. Biology and Medicine has an annual budget of around $90m and it would not be unreasonable to put 20% of that into long term support if there were good applications. I would suggest these are invited from those who persistently score 4.5-5 or where there is a chance to recruit a scientist from overseas with an outstanding track record. It should be conditional that PI's for such programmes would commit, say, 40% of their time to the Programme so that the Universities would have to relieve them of other duties (ie contribute). Ideally, the Universities should also contribute funds into these programmes. The Group Research Scheme and the Centres of Excellence schemes are steps in the right direction but still fail to support the real leaders sufficiently. The top groups have to be well funded if they are to be truly competitive with the world's best.

If 20% of the available funds are put into such a scheme this would mean that the applications supported would fall below to around 30%. However grants are already going in to Groups that would gain Programme grants, probably at the rate of around $1m per year each so the cost implications are not quite so serious. Also Programme holders could be barred from applying for a regular grant for say 3 years. The consequences of not funding some of the weaker applications, that would stand no chance in the UK or North America, should not be damaging. If two rounds of application per year were introduced, the grade 4 applications, which might not be funded under these new arrangements, could have second chance at the next meeting after revision.

Such a scheme would also support more post-docs. Several would be funded by such programmes and could develop their careers within the programmes.

Clinical Research.

There is a real problem here, the high medical salaries are preventing most gifted clinicians from taking time out to acquire basic research skills. The RGC cannot afford to pay Clinician Scientists and if the Health Authorities pay them, they want their clinical time. This defeats me! The only solution I can come up with is for other organisations such as the Medical Schools and Croucher Foundation, to fun a few Clinical Training Fellowships and also devise some further support to make full use of the people so trained. By way of contrast the UK MRC funds about 120 new 3-year Clinical Training Fellows (salary: 5k), around 20 new 4-year Clinical Scientists (salary: 0-35k) and around 5 10-year Senior Clinical Fellows (salary: 5-55k) per year. The impact these scientists make is considerable. The need for such scientist is likely to increase as the full impact of the human genome project is felt be clinical medicine.

Conclusion:

In my view Hong Kong has made great strides towards establishing a first class research environment, especially in terms of buildings and equipment. What is needed now is a greater focus on the highest quality researchers and the development of world class teams. Backing the best would encourage the best to stay, or to return to, Hong Kong. I think the impact would be rapid.

I have taken this chance to make some suggestions, some of which are quite radical and need considerable thought and discussion at future meetings. The potential for top class research in Hong Kong is huge and I firmly believe that Hong Kong could become a real centre of research excellence. This will have spin-off effects in attracting and developing biotechnology industries that are likely to become hugely important in the next century. This message needs to be sold to the political masters who want more "applied" research.

I feel privileged to have been associated with the development of the research culture so far and feel confident that it can progress even further.

Andrew McMichael