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The following details responses to comments posted on a previous blog about the ‘Age of Bioscience’, the BBSRC Strategic Plan 2010-2015. The comments facility was made available at the launch of the plan on 28 January and was left open for 2 weeks.
Continue reading: Responses to comments on BBSRC Strategic Plan 2010-2015
The week began with a constructive meeting with Directors and representatives of our Institutes to discuss further the mechanistic detail of how the scientific and other activities of our Institutes will best be assessed as the next phase of funding is rolled out.
One of the topics that is a source of concern for the research enterprise is based on the changing computational needs of the biological community, and the increasing significance of storage and bandwidth relative to the traditional focus on floating point operations per second. Getting this e-infrastructure right is a key requirement for the future, and several ongoing reviews are seeking to address this.
Continue reading: Assessment, infrastructure and the Norwich Research Park
The beginning of the week marked the move of one of my postdocs, Irena Spasić, who – based on some very nice work recorded in papers such as this and this – has secured a lectureship in Computer Science at Cardiff.
I then attended part of the programs of each of our 4 Research Committees, who were meeting near Windsor for the present grants round. It was as ever pleasing to see the high quality both of the great bulk of the applications and of the detailed discussions about the many proposals received.
Continue reading: Food and fuel for the next generation
Among last week’s engagements was the excellent launch of our joint programme (with DfID and the Scottish Government) entitled Combating Infectious Diseases of Livestock in Developing Countries (more manageably: CIDLID). Livestock are often the chief assets of the rural poor, and their diseases can consequently be particularly devastating. CIDLID will provide ca £13M of research investment via 16 grant proposals, each involving researchers based in the UK and in appropriate developing countries. As with the eradication of Rinderpest (considered to be worth $1Bn per annum), to which we contributed significantly (PDF), the potential gains could be huge.
Continue reading: Combating infectious diseases, photographs and memristors
It is reasonable to argue, and I have done so, that Science proceeds via an iterative process involving both analysis and synthesis. One of my pleasurable events this week was an invitation to the Rank Prize Fund awards, where both were in evidence. Lord Rank’s interests had covered both Agri-Food (“Rank Hovis McDougall” in my childhood and beyond) and cinematography (“The Rank Organisation”, famous for the gong, whose true audio history I heard at a lecture at school ca 1969 from Jimmy Blades and is here), and the awards are targeted to these areas. The three sets of winners had (i) pioneered non-invasive methods for assessing lactation in vivo, (ii) worked out a significant part of the molecular basis of gluten intolerance, and (iii) were the originators of the excimer-laser-based corneal correction of vision. (I was especially interested in the latter, as during the 1970s my uncle had pioneered the development of ruby lasers in treating detached retinas.)
Continue reading: Biology as analysis and synthesis
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