The acronym KBBE (and its equivalent twitter hashtag) may not yet be well known, but what it stands for – the Knowledge-Based BioEconomy – soon will be as it is recognized as being at the very core of the European Union’s economic development. To this end I visited Brussels to attend an extremely important conference on ‘the KBBE towards 2020’. The plenaries were from EC Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geogheghan-Quinn, from Marion Guillou (CEO of our sister French Agriculture Research Organisation INRA), ex-EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler and the CEO of Novozymes Steen Riisgard. It was excellently chaired by Maive Rute, Director of the Biotechnologies, Agriculture and Food Directorate. What was striking about each of these brilliant and inspiring presentations was the straightforward recognition – to the extent that they simply regarded it as axiomatic – that

1. a very large fraction of the future EU economy was indeed going to (have to) come from innovations in agriculture and the bioindustries that flow from the fact that pretty well all carbon (for energy and chemicals and materials of all kinds) will need to have been fixed from atmospheric CO2 by modern photosynthesis (as opposed to that which occurred on geological timescales).
2. that world-class bioscience and biotechnology were going to be the main means by which this would be achieved. [...]

It is not news that in order to make principled use of the data, ideas and knowledge from a scientific paper it is necessary to have read it. However, there are two immediate problems with this ostensibly simple fact. The first is that it is necessary to have access to the paper in the first place, and traditional publishing models require that the user needs to pay for this privilege – and not all can do so. The second is that even if one does have access to the paper, one potentially has access to millions of them (as I mention regularly, PubMed alone is increasing its list of peer-reviewed papers in biomedicine by two per minute!), so clearly any individual scientist (or layperson) needs means to prioritise those that they might wish to read. UKPubMedCentral (UKPMC) is a new service that is intended to provide them. [...]

Science (whose etymological origin means ‘knowledge’) is supposed to be based on objective and verifiable facts, but as I have blogged before there can occasionally be a tendency to groupthink. This is a phenomenon in which, simply by multiple repetition of them, ‘facts’ become widely ‘known’ after a while, even when they have no or limited experimental basis (something easily amplified via the Internet). (I experienced a related issue during my D. Phil., where I traced back a series of literature references to a widely cited claim that the purportedly passive concentrative uptake ratio of a particular lipophilic cation into Escherichia coli was independent of its external concentration over a huge range. [...]

Today – May 7, 2009 – is the 50th Anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture published as The Two Cultures. In this, he lamented the essential lack of even a rudimentary knowledge of the natural sciences (and technology) among those trained in the arts and humanities – but the expectation by the latter that scientists should themselves be ‘cultured’ by having a rather detailed knowledge of artistic matters sensu lato. He further considered that many of the failures he then perceived in political and public life as the UK developed technologically post-war were due to exactly this kind of ignorance. His ‘test’ for scientific knowledge was whether a person might know about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a topic also treated more lightheartedly by Flanders and Swann, but later (see e.g. the edition reprinted in 1998) he modified this (in the light of experience) to state that most non-scientists could not even describe properly the meaning of acceleration. [...]

Scientific debate is an important and inevitable component of the development of scientific knowledge, and consideration of its dynamics is illuminating. Historically, and to some degree nowadays, only a small fraction of the population was scientifically trained (or scientifically literate), and the relevant discourse was accordingly restricted. Not everyone who might have benefited from such knowledge knew everything. (Curiously, a completely different view was quite widespread in market economics: the so-called ‘equilibrium theory’ was based on perfectly rational behaviour that assumed that a very rapid diffusion of knowledge of the ‘true’ values of goods that led to their appropriate pricing in the marketplace – a view that one might now recognise as generally falsified by observations of the facts, and indeed a major cause of the present economic downturn. A book I am presently reading – Eric Beinhocker’s “The origin of wealth” – discusses lucidly a rather more accurate view of real economic systems, and I shall blog about this anon.) [...]