Scientific or Social Priorities for Brain Science? – Making a Difference

How we ought to prioritise research spending is a difficult problem.

On the one hand, we may wish to target research resources on the problems of most pressing social need, but this may be to pose questions which science is not in a position to answer. On the other hand, we may wish to target research resources on the problems which are for scientific reasons most interesting or most tractable, accepting that this might not be to target the most pressing social needs. Current thinking is that research priorities can be set most fairly not by specifying principles of justice in research spending, but rather by making the decision-making process more open, transparent and perhaps democratic. This can involve patient or citizen involvement in research programme design or research funding decision-making.