Last week saw my appearance before the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, giving oral evidence into their enquiry into Bioengineering (with its focus on stem cells, genetic modification and synthetic biology) My fellow witnesses on the day were Professor Sir Martin Evans, the discoverer of embryonic stem cells, and Professor Richard Kitney, a leader of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College, London (and Chair of a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering). The Committee asked some very penetrating but fair questions, and clearly understood the many important issues. The unedited transcript will soon be available, while the video recording of the session will be available from the  website for a month. Overall it was an interesting and surprisingly enjoyable experience.

Following this, I attended part of our Systems Biology Grantholders’ Workshop in  Edinburgh. Since the launch of our previous strategic plan, Systems Biology has been recognised as a major plank of our activity, and this 3-day workshop brought together grantholders from several of our initiatives in this area, including the CISBs, SABR projects, SySMO, MATSYB networks, joint ANR projects, etc. A particular feature of these approaches is the recognition that most biological systems and networks are sufficiently complex that only numerical models can allow us to understand them properly and effectively. The presentations were really first rate, with many problems now being attacked with the methods of systems biology, and several wonderful examples in which the models had shown that the previous assumptions were simply inconsistent with the data. A particularly striking feature was the increasing recognition that to change a system significantly it is normally necessary to modulate multiple steps at one time – but that finding them is a combinatorial optimisation problem. Tools for analysing systems in silico in this way should be a high priority, as they are generic.

One interesting sub-session looked at the employment prospects for Systems Biologists, given especially the multi-disciplinary nature of the subject. The fact that Systems Biologists are in high demand was made particularly evident by a comment that 6 of the 9 PIs on the Sulfosys project had secured jobs and thus moved labs during the project! Edinburgh is also hosting the 2010 International Conference on Systems Biology this October, where we very much anticipate that the UK participants will be able to showcase our outstanding position in the subject.

After spending 9 hours returning home from Edinburgh (a journey that should require 5), seeing the snowbound state of the urban landscapes throughout and hearing of the shortages of salt, I did come to wonder whether fermentation-derived weak acid salts might be a better alternative (as used in some countries). Something further for industrial biotechnology to deliver.

BBSRC Business magazine, winter 2010 issue available this week.

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