The case of the missing PhD student is emerging as one of the more perplexing problems in British science, going by the discussion this week at the Royal Society on funding research. According to Geoffrey Burnstock of the anatomy department at University College London: "Young postdoctoral scientists have vanished." He was supported by Sir Aaron Klug, director of the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge. "We find it increasingly difficult to fill our lab with good people," he said.
The principal of Edinburgh's Queen Margaret College has condemned as "tendentious rubbish" a claim by Napier Polytechnic of Edinburgh's principal that young people's education is suffering because Scotland has too many small, inefficient institutions. Napier's Dr William Turmeau has written to the Secretary of State for Scotland, proposing a series of federations to reduce Scotland's present 25 higher education institutions into ten, which he argues would be a more efficient use of resources.