The UKRI grants pause risks forcing out mid-career medical researchers

When UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced a pause in selected funding calls recently, it framed the measure as temporary: a recalibration rather than a retreat. But in medical science, continuity is not a luxury. It is the mechanism by which clinical programmes, laboratories and, crucially, careers remain viable.

Under normal conditions, UKRI project grant success rates hover at around one in four, depending on council and scheme. Most researchers, therefore, build their careers on repeated applications. As one senior academic once advised me, you “keep chucking things at the wall until something sticks”.

For mid-career scientists on fixed-term or fellowship-based contracts, making something stick is not optional. Project grants sustain laboratory staff, maintain regulatory approvals and signal competitiveness for promotion or permanence.

Competitiveness is judged against metrics that assume uninterrupted funding, so when a funding cycle is removed, the arithmetic shifts. What might register merely as an irritating delay for a senior professor can translate into stalled contracts, a thinning CV and a destabilised career for those in the middle.

The lack of slack in the system is not accidental. UK research is built around a funding system that rarely covers the full economic costs of research. Even UKRI, for example, only covers 80 per cent of the total cost of a project, but, importantly, that includes designated amounts for indirect and estates costs. For universities, these overhead payments are important to sustain infrastructure and administrative support. In many cases, they sustain the capacity to host research at all.

While industry partnerships can attract higher overhead rates, many medical charities fund research generously but make significantly lower, often non-existent, allocations for indirect costs. In a financially constrained environment, departments must consider sustainability. Grants that do not recover costs cannot easily subsidise those that do.

The consequence is a significant narrowing of viable funding routes, particularly for mid-career researchers without permanent posts. At the individual level, applicants at the mid-career stage are actively discouraged from applying for charity funding. At the institutional level, smaller institutions actively discourage everyone from applying for charity funding. If UKRI project grants represent one of the few mechanisms that both sustain research programmes and recover institutional costs, a pause does not merely delay applications, it exposes how dependent the system has become on a continuous flow of overhead-bearing awards.

In one research-intensive department close to me, the effect of the “loss of the middle” on the demographic profile is striking. There are senior academics approaching retirement and a steady influx of doctoral students and junior postdoctoral researchers. What is far less visible is the cohort in between, the 35- to 50-year-olds.

The implications will be subtle at first. Laboratories will continue to function. Grant applications will still be submitted. But mid-career scientists perform work that is difficult to replace. Senior professors rarely stand at the bench. Doctoral students do not design clinical trials. The glue that holds together medical science often sits in the middle: supervising experiments, navigating regulatory frameworks, refining methodology and training the next generation in skills not easily captured in grant metrics. The gradual erosion of this expertise, continuity and institutional memory will become apparent only after several years, but it will be dramatic nonetheless.

Funding volatility also shapes the type of research that is sustained. Larger, well-established groups and, to some extent, well-known institutions are better positioned to absorb short-term disruption. They enjoy diversified funding portfolios and reputational capital that allow them to weather uncertainty. Smaller and mid-sized groups, often led by mid-career researchers, operate with a considerably smaller margin.

Large programmes are essential for scale and reproducibility, but a healthy research ecosystem depends on heterogeneity: on the coexistence of expansive centres and agile, independent groups. The latter are frequently conceptual risk-takers, so when fragility disproportionately affects them, innovation across the system risks narrowing.

Biomedical researchers are internationally mobile. The UK competes for talent with systems that offer longer grant durations, larger awards or more predictable funding environments. We have already seen the reluctance of international scientists to move to the UK after Brexit: the UKRI funding pause will only make the UK even less attractive.

The same goes for home-grown talent. The issue is not that a single pause will trigger an exodus, but that repeated uncertainty reshapes incentives. For a mid-career scientist weighing long-term prospects, stability matters – and the UK funding landscape is becoming a more precarious place to try to build a career. And this effect trickles down: I no longer recommend an academic career path to any of my junior trainees.

The UKRI funding pause may indeed prove temporary. But if the loss of a single cycle materially destabilises a career stage central to training, translation and methodological continuity, this suggests a funding ecosystem operating with minimal resilience.

The question, therefore, is not simply how quickly calls resume. It is what this fragility reveals about how we value scientific labour. It amplifies doubts about whether the structure beneath British medical research is robust enough to sustain the middle on which it depends.

The writer is a mid-career academic at a UK research-intensive university.