Lithuania holds the next presidency of the EU, and we had a very useful meeting with Minister Counsellor Sigitas Mitkus at the Lithuanian Embassy in London. I had visited Lithuania in 1989 as part of a Royal Society-sponsored trip to the former Soviet Union, where I set up my longstanding collaboration with Prof Arseny Kaprelyants. Lithuania has the fastest growing economy in Europe, and we anticipate further useful links.

A now-published report to which I contributed on e‐Science and e‐Infrastructure needs of UK Life Sciences industries is available, and I had a useful meeting with the coauthors and others to take forward our thinking on implementation strategies. Another member of the e-infrastructure leadership Council is Tony Hey, who pointed me to some interesting blog posts of his on Open Access. [...]

Much of last week was occupied by my attendance at an eponymous conference in Dundee that we helped sponsor on plant root biology, under the auspices of the International Society for Root Research. I co-chaired one of the sessions and gave a short talk based on a couple of review articles and calculations.

There were a huge number of highlights, not least in meeting so many of this community, but probably the outstanding talk was the opening keynote by Jonathan Lynch, whose wide-ranging review covered everything from molecular genetics and very high-tech measurements of root morphology at different scales (e.g. using laser ablation tomography as the best method for measuring aerenchyma) to the substantial yield improvements that these methods, and some careful thinking, plant breeding and agronomy, were having in a variety of African countries. Effective breeding increases both shallow (and spreading) roots for improved phosphorus uptake and deep roots for improved nitrogen use efficiency and drought tolerance. Roots should be ‘steep, deep and cheap’, said Lynch. I also much enjoyed keynote presentations by Malcom Bennett and Michelle Watt, both vertically integrating quite fundamental molecular knowledge with downstream physiological properties (with the latter showing improvements in water acquisition by deep roots, with 10cm of increased depth in no-till agriculture in Australia translating to 0.5 tonnes per ha increase in wheat grain yields). Overall I learnt a lot about the potential and research needs of this core element of Global Food Security. [...]

My first appointment last week was to give the welcoming address at the opening of the Systems Microscopy Centre in Manchester, led by Mike White. The Department of Bioenergy and Climate Change published its Bioenergy Strategy, noting that indeed bioenergy  is expected to play a key role in our ability to meet the 2020 renewables target as well as longer term carbon reduction targets to 2030 and 2050. It is also a response to the Committee on Climate Change’s Bioenergy Review.  The timing chimed with the announcement of a new grant on Miscanthus breeding, that was also mentioned in the Prime Minister’s speech on the Green Economy. We also had a very useful meeting of the members of Rothamsted Research.

I attended a very interesting meeting of the Foundation for Science and Technology, on “Reducing the risk of a systemic failure of the banking system” (or ‘yet another’ failure, one might say). The speakers included John Kay, who provided a very thoughtful insight on some aspects that insiders got wrong, and Andy Haldane, whose wonderful paper with Lord May I blogged about before. I would like to conclude that I was reassured, but there is a distance between the perceived remedies (some of which – like requiring banks only to trade at levels that are backed by real assets – seem and are rather obvious) and their application. There was however general agreement about the need to separate investment (‘casino’) banking from retail banking, and the need for simplicity, a loose coupling of subsystems, and proper incentivisation. Certainly we need to get ourselves a financial system (‘responsible capitalism’) that provides for the creation of value and not just the simple transfer of money (real and imaginary) from the majority of taxpayers to others who are seemingly out of the control of the public and the public good. [...]

Following the excellent settlement for the overall Research Base announced at the Comprehensive Spending Review, we are all now busy setting down the next draft of our so-called Delivery Plan, so this week’s blog will be comparatively short. One day last week involved a meeting with George Freeman, MP for mid-Norfolk and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture, as well as a reception (with all the Research Councils) for members of the new Parliament with an interest in Science and Technology, hosted by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Biologics are a significant part of our portfolio, and I attended a reception hosted by UCB who focus on their development in both the UK and Belgium. [...]

Anyone with an interest in UK Science cannot fail to have been delighted at the announcement in last week’s Comprehensive Spending Review speech that the Science Budget would not be cut and would be ‘frozen’ at ‘flat cash’ for the next 4 years. We do not yet know what this means for BBSRC and the many calls on our resources, and there may be some challenges around allocations of spend on capital projects, but compared with what most interested parties were anticipating it is a stunning result. The clear recognition that our scientific excellence does indeed have economic and other impacts will have played a significant role, and we can all be grateful to those who helped prosecute both the arguments and the evidence. [...]