Scienceogram UK

Making sense of science spending

  • Cancer kills nearly a third of us. We spend less than £5 per person per year looking for a cure.

  • Energy costs us £2200 each per year. We invest around £10 per person per year in energy research.

  • Discovering the Higgs boson literally cost peanuts.

    The UK subscription to CERN and the LHC costs us £1.50 per person per year; about the same as we spend on peanuts.

Science is woefully underfunded compared to the scale of the problems it’s trying to solve.

From health, to energy, to blue-skies research, science is trying to tackle the biggest challenges facing humanity. We wanted to know how the investment we’re making in science stacked up against those challenges, so we created the Scienceogram to make sense of our spending against the personal economic or human cost of the problems it’s trying to tackle—and it looks like our miniscule spending on science doesn’t make sense at all.