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Last week involved 2 days of interviews, on which announcements will be made in due course, the first for the Directorship of the John Innes Centre and the second for future members of Council. The latter is an annual event, and I would encourage readers of this blog to consider the best ways to make themselves and colleagues aware of the opportunities to join our Council. As someone who did previously serve on BBSRC Council for 6 years, I can certainly confirm that it is an interesting, illuminating and worthwhile activity.
Continue reading: Interviewing, international, and inspiring the next generation
Unlike the Spartoí, born of dragon’s teeth, Strategic Plans do not spring fully formed from the earth. Ours, which was launched this week with an accompanying video, represents the culmination of considerable work and extensive consultations with our community and with our Strategy Panels and Strategy Advisory Board. Indeed the formal consultation phase attracted more than 120 written replies from individuals and organisations. Under the strapline the Age of Bioscience, the resulting document (PDF) both celebrates the strength and importance of UK Bioscience, and sets out a most exciting vision of how BBSRC science can continue to contribute hugely to the health and wealth of the nation (and globally). As part of our continuing consultation, reactions to the strategic plans are invited via this blog or via twitter.
Continue reading: Strategic plans, ageing and food security
BBSRC’s new Strategic Plan for 2010-2015 launches today entitled ‘The age of bioscience’.
The plan is accompanied by a video including an introduction from me followed by an explanation of the place of bioscience research in the world and the vital role played by the BBSRC research community.
You can read the Strategic Plan and then post your feedback, comments and questions on this blog. Alternatively, if you are on Twitter, you can leave a comment on my Twitter page twitter.com/dbkell.
Comments will be collated, and we will respond as soon as possible after commenting has closed on 11 February 2010.
Last week began with the viva voce exam of my last research student, Eva Zelena, who emerged from a 3.5h discourse based on her work on developing and exploiting methods for metabolomics with flying colours. The first use of the word ‘metabolome’ was in 1998, a year in which I was invited to join domain experts in Streptomyces biology to help develop tools for the emerging field of ’omics, as part of a BBSRC Initiative called Functional Genomics Technologies. This was one of our earliest initiatives as the world learned to adapt to and make use of the post-genomic era, and was followed, for instance, by two rounds of the Investigating Gene Function initiatives (a review of which will appear this year).
Continue reading: Metabolomics, food security and blogging a book
It is not news that in order to make principled use of the data, ideas and knowledge from a scientific paper it is necessary to have read it. However, there are two immediate problems with this ostensibly simple fact. The first is that it is necessary to have access to the paper in the first place, and traditional publishing models require that the user needs to pay for this privilege – and not all can do so. The second is that even if one does have access to the paper, one potentially has access to millions of them (as I mention regularly, PubMed alone is increasing its list of peer-reviewed papers in biomedicine by two per minute!), so clearly any individual scientist (or layperson) needs means to prioritise those that they might wish to read. UKPubMedCentral (UKPMC) is a new service that is intended to provide them.
Continue reading: UKPubMedCentral – an Open Access digital library of biomedical science
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