Last week was a week of very necessary catching up with a lot of paperwork I had purposely allowed to accumulate, with comparatively few external engagements to report, although I did attend an event held as part of the upcoming celebrations of the University of Warwick’s half-century. Such meetings provide a welcome opportunity for discussions with senior managers of Higher Education Institutes, with whom the Research Councils anticipate ever-closer working relationships. I also served on an interview panel for the Global Food Security Champion role. 

This week I shall thus mainly extemporise, based on recent papers or websites to which I was alerted, about a few of the areas that hold our interest. First was (appropriately enough) an Open Access (OA) paper on the development of Open Access from 1993 to 2009. While its contents can be read by following the link, it is worth noting that the average annual increase in OA papers since 2000 has been 30%. It would seem that the trend towards virtually universal OA publishing is (happily) now irreversible. [...]

Visits to Higher Education Institutes and the like are a significant part of our dialogue, and last week I was pleased to visit the University of Liverpool (whose Vice Chancellor, Sir Howard Newby, is also Chair of the Rural Economy and Land Use scheme). As part of this I was delighted to do the honours at the formal opening of a superb new Proteomics Laboratory at the University, bringing together an enviable suite of state-of-the-art mass spectrometers and related equipment, along with the necessary information management. Following this, I delivered a lecture in the University’s Science in Society series, with the (given) title “Why should the taxpayer fund biosciences research?”. The answers are indeed very obvious, whether from the point of view of its contribution to the economy (see e.g. here and here) or from its role in solving most of the grand challenges faced by Society, leave alone the massive public interest in science and technology. It will be important that we engage constructively with that public interest so that individuals and groups across society may participate in shaping how scientific advances are pursued and deployed to maximise social benefits. [...]

The chief theme of last week’s activities (and of course in one sense it necessarily underpins everything we do every week), seems to have been Sustainability. One internal meeting was about an upcoming workshop we shall shortly be announcing on soil carbon sequestration, since while the oceans can sequester considerable carbon their acidification will probably limit what is acceptable for biological reasons.

As is well known, the ‘blockbuster’ era of the pharmaceuticals industry will probably be seen on a historical timescale to have been short-lived, and present pipelines cannot support existing investments. One casualty of this was represented by the very sad announcement of the closure of Pfizer’s R&D site at Sandwich, despite its longstanding excellence in bringing drugs to market. [...]

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. [...]

Apart from a considerable amount of shortlisting and interviewing for various posts, my first main visit of the week was to Rothamsted Research, which bills itself as “the largest agricultural research centre in the United Kingdom and almost certainly the oldest agricultural research station in the world”, starting from its time as the Rothamsted Experimental Station. I was shown a great many exciting areas of science, from food and non-food crop improvements including novel means for water, carbon and nutrient sequestration in plant roots, through metagenomics and farm platform technology. Rothamsted is anticipated to be a major player in our delivery of improved crops for global food security.

We also had a very useful meeting with the Office for Life Sciences, concentrating in particular on our strategies for industrial biotechnology and bioenergy as part of the Knowledge-Based BioEconomy. [...]