Science is back
The 2025 Marsden Fund grants have been announced, and finally they are now overwhelmingly going on hard science, rather than politics. I’ve updated my comparison table below.
| 2008 | 2017 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Science | 88% | 80% | 72% | 73% | 92% |
| Humanities | 8% | 11% | 13% | 7% | 6% |
| Maori | 3% | 5% | 8% | 17% | 3% |
| Identity | 1% | 2% | 5% | 3% | 0% |
| Political | 0% | 3% | 2% | 1% | 0% |
As the Royal Society got more woke, less and less went on science, and more on woke projects and the like. In 2023 and 2024, 1 in 4 grants went to non-science areas. Now with a new ministerial direction, this is down to 1 in 12.
This is why who makes up Government does matter. Here’s some of the great projects being funded that may have missed out previously for nonsense such as $360,000 to collect disabled indigenous stories about climate change!
- Breaking the N₂ Barrier: Ion-Beam-Engineered Vanadium Oxynitrides for Ambient Electrochemical Ammonia Synthesis
- Combating drug resistance in cancers using shape-shifting inhibitors of DNA-mutating enzymes
- Genetic and structural basis of antibiotic resistance spread: targeting a bacteria-bacteriophage partnership
- Harnessing beneficial host-microbe interactions in the respiratory tract to improve infectious disease outcomes
We should thank Judith and Shane for getting science funding focused back on science!