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. [...]

Last week saw the penultimate of our ‘roadshow’ conversations, held in Glasgow and attracting participants from both Scotland and elsewhere. As ever we had a very useful exchange of thoughts on a wide range of topics, not least about how to streamline the peer review process, where some very helpful suggestions were made. In line with an interesting recent editorial, one question elicited discussion on the extent to which funding should be concentrated on (the typically more tractable)  model organisms, a question brought into focus by the comparatively little study devoted to Chalara fraxinea (the cause of ash die-back – here is a link on how to spot it) nor to thousands of other organisms. I won’t claim to have any answers here, but clearly folk may wish to give special thought to justifying the choice of organism in proposals.

I have blogged before about 3D printing, and a recent piece gives a nice example of how it can be used to save thousands on certain laboratory supplies. [...]

Last week began with one of the regular meetings of the Chief Executives of MRC, EPSRC, BBSRC and the TSB with senior representatives of AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, along with representatives of the Bioindustry Association and the ABPI. This ‘Pharma Forum’ provides a useful vehicle for discussing cross-cutting research directions, especially given the net worth to the UK economy of the pharmaceuticals industry.

We also had one of the regular meetings of Chief Executives with Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, which again provided a very useful forum for the exchange of thoughts on a variety of topical and strategic issues as we move towards the autumn statement. [...]

Because of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the blog had a week off. Among many other meetings was a very useful one with Sir John Beddington, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, and other Departmental Chief Scientists. These meetings provide excellent fora for developing scientific thinking across Government Departments, and certainly expose me to issues broader than those that I typically contemplate.

We were pleased to note the announcement (amid a welter of bad puns such as ‘tomato genome project bears fruit’, ‘sauce code’, and the like) of the sequences of two tomato genomes. Given the very widespread consumption of tomatoes, and their perceived health benefits, it will be most exciting to see how quickly this knowledge translates into strains with improved traits such as taste, anti-oxidant content, post-harvest longevity, disease resistance, and so on. (Incidentally, growing tomatoes in saline conditions can improve their taste, but not yield, considerably!) [...]

As well as a variety of internal meetings, I attended a couple of receptions, the first of which was at BIS – largely for industrialists and partner organisations. This was very useful, and I met a number of folk who would not normally see themselves as close to our interests. The second was an annual event (though a first for me) where ‘scientists meet the media’ at the Royal Society. Again I made a number of potentially important contacts that will help get the BBSRC message out.

The main visit of the week was to Harper Adams University College. Harper Adams is a major provider of agricultural education, training and knowledge transfer, as well as (largely applied) research. This was thus an exceptionally interesting visit. Without seeking to pick out specific areas, I note that Harper Adams runs the only UK degree courses in Agricultural Engineering, and I saw some very interesting work at the interface of engineering and agriculture, especially in the areas of using modern technology to plant, sense, weed, and harvest agricultural crops. The whole area of ‘precision agriculture’ is going to provide an important contribution to increasing the productivity of food and non-food crops, and we can expect it to expand significantly. [...]