A campaign group, calling itself ‘Science for the future’ is, today, delivering a coffin to Number 10 Downing street in London as a protest against what they claim to be the death of British science. Their concern is that the UK state funded research councils,  (particularly the Engineering and physical sciences research council, (EPRSC) that funds most of the chemistry research in the UK) are giving priority to research that will deliver good economic outcomes over blue sky research. This group isn’t just a rag tag bunch of disgruntled scientist who are peeved that their projects don’t get funded. Its backed by a heady list of Nobel Laureates and heavily honoured scientists who published their views on the matter in a letter to todays Daily Telegraph. Between the press coverage in the Telegraph, the BBC etc. and twitter (#science4thefuture) things are being pretty well covered. So I thought I’d focus on one aspect of the group’s issues with the EPSRC. Any grant proposal submitted to the EPSRC has to include a section addressing the ‘National Importance‘ of the research. The guidelines on how to construct this section of the proposal states: National Importance is the extent, over the long term, for example 10-50 years, to which the research proposed; contributes to, or helps maintain the health of other research disciplines contributes to addressing key UK societal challenges, contributes to current or future UK economic...