My first external visit of the week was to York, where I had discussions with the National Non-Food Crops Centre (NNFCC) and the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products. These have both been well ahead of the curve in recognising the need to integrate the plant-based fixation of carbon and its conversion, extraction and processing into high(er) value products besides foodstuffs and feed. Many issues remain in terms of rolling out the Knowledge Based BioEconomy on a large scale, but it is necessary to have things to roll out in the first place!

We had a very useful meeting of the Industrial Biotechnology Leadership Forum, including Minister for Business and Enterprise Mark Prisk. The number of examples of a move to sustainable, biologically based chemicals production is growing apace. Readers may be interested in the Forum’s autumn newsletter, as well as a paper by NESTA on Financing Industrial Biotechnology in the UK. It would seem that Finance for Industrial Biotechnology is something that is mainly likely to come not from the Venture Capital sector but more from large corporates within the relevant sectors. [...]

A very full week last week (ok, they are all ‘full’) started with the visit of Minister of Universities and Science David Willetts to a topping out ‘milestones’ ceremony celebrating partial completion of the ‘Development Phase 1’ building at the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright. This is a major project for us, with this part alone costing rather north of £100M. It will allow a major expansion of our abilities to carry out research in this space, and will surely prove a magnet to other talented researchers. For reasons of biosecurity, the building itself includes many technical innovations, as well as high specifications even for more conventional materials like the concrete of which it is constructed. This kind of infrastructure is paralleled by e-infrastructure, another important part of scientific infrastructure for the development of which I attended another meeting. [...]

As well as a further set of PPDRs and many internal meetings, a number of last week’s engagements seemed to be around the animal health area, including a meeting with Chris Whitty, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for International Development, and the launch of the Global Strategic Alliance for the Coordination of Research on the Major Infectious Diseases of Animals and Zoonoses (STAR-IDAZ) network. The latter is an EC-funded project, led by Alex Morrow of Defra, designed to bring together relevant experts from a very large number of countries worldwide to help coordinate of national research programmes on animal health (including livestock, aquatic animals and bees) and zoonoses world-wide.

Sharing information and discussing it widely is an important part of our work, and the Research Councils hosted a series of meetings with Professor Kathy Sykes from the University of Bristol who chairs the relevant Advisory Group for RCUK. In terms of dissemination, I was pleased to note that this blog itself is referred to as a ‘top tweet’ in the Biofuels Digest! [...]

I had expected to start last week by going to the Royal Society to attend the speech of, and discussion with, EU Commissioner for Research Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who we had met previously in the context of the KBBE, but a ‘perfect storm’ of train problems (multiple floods, vandals and signalling) conspired against me. However, BBSRC was well represented, and there was due recognition of the Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change that we are leading with INRA.

We had a very useful meeting of Council, that as usual covered a fair bit of ground, and in particular endorsed a more detailed version of our Delivery Plan.

I was also pleased to attend the launch of Alzheimer’s Research UK at the Palace of Westminster. [...]

Last week started with a major announcement, and an important opening of a research facility previously sanctioned. The new announcement was for a £100 million building programme for facilities at our Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright. Since the major UK-wide outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in 2001, and subsequent reports such as those by Anderson (twice (PDF)), Beringer, Callaghan, Gilligan (PDF) and Gull (PDF), the value of maintaining research into exotic animal diseases, and preferably concentrating it at a well-constructed world-class site, has been well recognised. For instance, Anderson showed that the costs (PDF) of the 2001 FMD outbreak were some £8,000 million, and an independent report (PDF) showed that pre-emptive action by Philip Mellor and his colleagues at the IAH prevented the incursion of bluetongue disease into the UK at a financial saving (PDF) for one year alone of £485 million – let alone the saving in human and animal misery. We are all really delighted with this new announcement, that will put BBSRC researchers, and the UK as a whole, at the forefront of research into diseases of this type – many of which are viral (such as ‘swine’ flu) and as zoonotic diseases can infect humans as well as animals. [...]