One major meeting of last week was our latest Audit Board meeting, that covered a variety of areas of importance to ensuring the orderly running of BBSRC, including scrutiny of our financial audits and of potential risks of various kinds.

We also had the last of our community ‘conversations’ at a well-attended venue in London, constituting the last of our ‘roadshows’ for this season. One topic which we trailed involved some plans for rolling out funding in Industrial Biotechnology, where we plan further open meetings in the new year; these were also one discussion topic of an extended internal strategy meeting that took place last week.

I enjoyed attendance at the Campaign for Science and Engineering annual lecture, given in the Science Museum by Lord Heseltine, who had recently authored an important review (PDF) on industrial growth strategy and who said a number of very positive things about the importance of scientific research.

I was honoured to be elected a 2012 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of a surprisingly small number of Britons; the actual award will occur during next year’s AAAS annual meeting, in Boston.

Last week I mentioned how much of the full English breakfast genome we had sequenced, and a major advance that we funded has now been made in wheat genomics.

Drugs can be quite promiscuous – I have a review on the subject coming out – and I was interested to see how much interest there is now in drug repurposing.

Finally, there was also a useful RCUK meeting on Open Access (that I could not attend), whose minutes are now on the RCUK website.

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