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 (which in all fairness he probably won't be after about Tuesday).

The DTI of course originally dumped Science on the newly-formed DIUS back in 2007. They had been taking care of it for a few years after the thirty year marriage of Science and Education ended, when a long flirtation with Business led Science to abandon Education for a bigger house and more money.

Peter Mandelson is a bit of a bogeyman in British politics. No matter how unpopular he is, or how many scandals he's caught up in, he just keeps coming back, and as a result of this, along with pretty much everything he's ever done, he is deeply disliked by many people. Putting Peter Mandelson and science in the same sentence is naturally going to arouse interest and concern. Hence my title, calculated to get you here to read a thousand words of frankly mediocre speculation that's going to have no satisfying conclusion to it.

How will this actually affect British science? The "Ethical Palaeontologist" notes with concern that the interests of business and science are often not the same. Science Magazine echo the thoughts of many when they recall the infamous occasion when the DTI cut £75m from the Science budget to deal with Rover's collapse. To be honest though, I can't see that shifting departments is going to significantly change things. More important is what this reveals about the government's longer term strategy for science.

Mark Henderson at The Times makes the observation that John Denham, the Minister for DIUS, was a rare thing - a politician with scientific training - and laments his passing. But as Mark himself points out, this may not be such a big deal, as Denham, along with Lord Drayson, Mandelson and it seems a broad consensus in Brown's government are all behind the same initiative to reform science funding. This initiative was publicised back in February, and can be summed up crudely as follows:

"...more of the £6 billion science budget will be allocated to studies with commercial applications, or those that address urgent problems such as global warming and disease."

This was put into practise in the 2009 budget, with the Research Councils forced to divert £106m of funding to areas with "predicted economic benefit." This goes against one of the golden principles of British science - that governments should not interfere with the allocation of grants by research councils. To my mind it also goes against sensible economics - if research has economic potential, then government should encourage industry to invest in it. For me, government-funded research projects should be like BBC programs: if anything they should concentrate on things that don't have obvious economic potential, the things that won't get funded in the free market; along with things in the public interest that probably should be left in the hands of business (like clinical trials).

Another interesting phrase that crops up in Labour's science policy is the idea of competitive advantage, as mentioned by John Denham:

"We need to do all these things as our national policy increasingly identifies the areas of greatest economic potential and competitive advantage.”

At first glance this seems to be the same sort of thinking that supports free trade - that it's better for nations to specialise at the things they are good at. In the context of free markets this is a brilliant idea; in the context of science it's potentially terrible, for two reasons. Firstly, science relies on repeatability. You can prove anything with a study; the test of an idea is when research groups around the world can independently reproduce your findings, and if specialisation goes too far you may lose that vital redundancy. The second problem is that science isn't like a car or a stereo - you can't easily assess its quality unless you have your own experts in the field.

To be honest though it's a struggle to provide much in the way of meaningful analysis without a lot more detail about how these vague concepts would be implemented in practise. We've seen the first clues in the 2009 budget, and in the new requirements set out by research councils, which ask researchers applying for funds to set out the economic and social impacts of their work. The likes of George Monbiot are deeply concerned by these guidelines, suggesting that they would have "stopped Darwin", but the truth is that they are incredibly vague, and subject to a great deal of interpretation by review panels within the research councils.

Another obfuscating factor is the likelihood that the new cabinet will be in charge for at most 11 months, and could conceivably be gone in days. The Conservatives were unhappy with DIUS and appear to concur with Mandelson et al that the future direction of science is tied with industry, supporting the "knowledge-based economy". What a different Labour leader might do is anybody's guess. What we really need is a debate that would give the main parties the chance to set out their plans for science in the 2010s.

We also need more information from the Research Councils to help us understand how these government directives are affecting research funding on the ground. If the government is encouraging industry to come in and pour more money into research, without detracting from scientists' ability to engage in the sort of blue sky endeavours that are essential for scientific progress, then I'm all for it providing proper checks and balances are in place. If, instead, they plan to "make science pay for itself", then we have a very serious problem ahead. We need to get clarification on this. Science was the forgotten issue in the European elections, but we need to press for answers now that the countdown to a general election has pretty much begun.