As we near the Christmas holidays (and this will be the last blog of 2011), I can look back on an exceptional year of achievement for BBSRC: a ring-fenced budget, many exciting scientific breakthroughs, the maintenance of the UK as the premier nation in biology, and a slew of recent announcements of large capital sums awarded for important biological projects. A measure of this was my latest quarterly talk to staff last week, in which I listed some of these, that occupied fully 90 minutes.

Much of the rest of the week was punctuated by celebratory events, including a trip to St James’s Palace to launch and take forward thinking on the Festival of food and farming (“Farming in the Park”) taking place in Hyde Park in September 2013. Among the speeches, including one from Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, we were honoured to be addressed by His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who spoke eloquently and without notes on the importance of British farming and food, as well as providing a witty and entertaining history of our palatial surrounding.
Continue reading: Celebrations, talks and bioenergy

Last week started with a useful and constructive meeting of the e-infrastructure advisory group that is looking at the e-science needs of our research community. We aim to report by the end of February.

Along with Robert Winston, Dave Delpy from EPSRC and Brian Johnson who chaired the recent synthetic biology dialogue activities, I spoke at a very interesting meeting of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee taking forward the Synthetic Biology dialogue. The consensus at all stages of the dialogue has been the clear nuancing and sophistication of views, with no real evidence of ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ camps, and this was again manifest. It was obvious that everyone enjoyed getting to grips with the significant issues involved in assessing the risk: benefit ratio of any new technology such as synthetic biology, along with the recognition that its roll out would change significantly over time. We shall very much be continuing this dialogue in various fora.
Continue reading: Synthetic biology, 3Rs and food

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.
Continue reading: The Comprehensive Spending Review, Food and Software

This week contained many short meetings, on which I do not usually blog, but one interesting event I attended was held in the gardens of Westminster Abbey and sponsored by the National Farmers Union and Morrison’s. This allowed the speakers – including Defra Secretary of State Caroline Spelman and Agriculture Minister Jim Paice – to reflect on the importance of vertical integration of the entire food chain, and the sponsors to show off some outstanding British produce (including some wonderful blackberries sourced from Kent). Berries are an excellent source of antioxidants. (In support for the UK’s 2018 World Cup soccer bid, there was also a truly awesome demonstration of ‘keepy-uppy’ by the current world record holder, Dan Magness. Nice to see the UK holding at least one soccer record!) There were many useful networking opportunities with MPs and other delegates, including some very useful discussions of the Red Tractor scheme.
Continue reading: Ageing, roots and farming

After our return from the US following the ‘big data’ mission I described last week, it was very much catching-up and preparation time in Swindon as I shall be away from the office quite a bit in the next few weeks. I did have a couple of appointments in London, the first visiting JISC, whose Board I have now joined, for a briefing about its organisational infrastructure. JISC is broadly responsible for IT infrastructure underpinning Higher Education, and (inter alia) for innovations in software and information technology that will assist the scholarly enterprise. Obviously this is going to be increasingly important given the digital and online availability of increasing amounts of text and data. JISC also looks after the JANET network that connects Higher Education Institutes.
Continue reading: Food, information and visual text