Amid the carnage surrounding Gordon Brown's cabinet reshuffle, science has lost its footing and looks like it may end up as simply another tool for business and enterprise (read: grants redirected to profitable areas of research). Over at the Lay Scientist, Martin Robbins has a fairly thorough round up of the changes, and what they might mean:
From the reshuffle that took place yesterday, one piece of news has slipped out under the radar. DIUS, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills currently responsible for the UK science funding councils, is apparently being disbanded just two years after its creation by Gordon Brown. As a result, responsibility for science will be propelled back across the alphabet soup of new government departments to the Dept. of Business, Enterprise, Regulation and something else beginning with R (BERR), formerly known as the Department of Trade and Industry, and now renamed again to become the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills. This will be run by Peter Mandelson, when he's not busy being Gordon Brown's right-hand man
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Of course, once upon a time we had the Department of Education and Science.