FORUM: Pure science or business expedience? - Debate on plan for UK Centre for Medical Research & Innovation laboratory in Somers Town have been stifled, says John Mason

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Published: 22 July, 2010

THE decision to appoint new architects for the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation underlines the need to question the entire project. 

Wider questions than those of design remain unanswered.

Every large-scale planning decision comes with its own set of costs and benefits: the job of decision-makers is to balance the two. 

The proposed UKMCRI in Brill Place is no exception. 

As with any commercial scheme, it has to be measured against scale, appropriateness to its immediate surroundings and the value of competing uses.

The trouble with the Wellcome Foundation, University College London, Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK (the consortium behind the Brill Place scheme) is that they act as if they are outside these rules.

“We want Brill Place”, they say, “so it is necessarily good for everyone”.’

Offering only the vaguest detail, the consortium has assumed that planning permission is already theirs. 

This, however, is only the case if they are prepared to bypass the normal checks and balances in the planning process for a large scheme on a restricted site previously earmarked for another purpose. 

Do Malcolm Grant (UCL) and Mark Walport (Wellcome) think they have a right to help themselves to any piece of land in Somers Town for whatever purpose they choose?

The Brill Place proposals as they currently stand constitute overdevelopment of the site. The scheme would overshadow its immediate neighbours,

St Pancras and the British Library and both the Ossulston and Cooper’s Lane estates.

Few of us oppose stem cell research but does this mean it has to take place on this site and no other? 

Harpal Kamar of Cancer Research UK claims this is “probably the most important medical research project anywhere in the world over the last 20 years”. 

If this is true the project necessarily belongs to a wider association of interests (both scientific and lay) than the four partners. 

Where is the debate within the wider scientific community? 

What are the issues and what choices need to be made?

And isn’t it time to stop pretending that medical technology is a self-evident benefit, a zero sum game in which there are no losers.

Little wonder that, in its 2008 assessment of the plan, the Universities and Skills Select Committee of the House of Commons called it “high-risk”. 

We don’t yet have sufficient evidence to judge the claims made by the consortium. All we have is a hastily thrown-together scheme by four interests whose agenda has just a single item – Brill Place. 

The consortium’s claims need to be validated by criteria external to their own interests.

The claim that no reasonable person could oppose this scheme has so far been used to stifle debate.

As we learn more about the planning application next month, it will become clearer that this consortium is riding roughshod over both the planning system and local opinion. 

And this is before the partners in the consortium have decided what will go into the new centre.

But even these criticisms don’t go far enough.

The underlying issue is not biomedical research but the way it is organised. 

Are an ambitious, predatory academic organisation and a philanthropic charity linked to the global pharmaceuticals industry best placed to represent the future of British science?

The consortium has yet to show us what their detailed goals are, what existing models of biomedical research they are measuring themselves against and whether they can generate a broadly-based debate within the scientific community itself. 

The new centre will be in the name of the Medical Research Council. Perhaps the key issue is how far a cash-strapped MRC can, under these conditions, be accountable or continue to balance the demands of pure science and commerce.

•  John Mason is a local activist and former university lecturer