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Among last week’s engagements was the excellent launch of our joint programme (with DfID and the Scottish Government) entitled Combating Infectious Diseases of Livestock in Developing Countries (more manageably: CIDLID). Livestock are often the chief assets of the rural poor, and their diseases can consequently be particularly devastating. CIDLID will provide ca £13M of research investment via 16 grant proposals, each involving researchers based in the UK and in appropriate developing countries. As with the eradication of Rinderpest (considered to be worth $1Bn per annum), to which we contributed significantly (PDF), the potential gains could be huge.
Continue reading: Combating infectious diseases, photographs and memristors
Last week saw my appearance before the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, giving oral evidence into their enquiry into Bioengineering (with its focus on stem cells, genetic modification and synthetic biology) My fellow witnesses on the day were Professor Sir Martin Evans, the discoverer of embryonic stem cells, and Professor Richard Kitney, a leader of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College, London (and Chair of a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering). The Committee asked some very penetrating but fair questions, and clearly understood the many important issues. The unedited transcript will soon be available, while the video recording of the session will be available from the website for a month. Overall it was an interesting and surprisingly enjoyable experience.
Continue reading: Bioengineering and systems biology
This first blog after the noughties is purposely something of a miscellany, though while working up a link to the word potpourri, I did notice that the Wikipedia version contains the somewhat deadpan comment “Modern homes avoid having pots of moldly [sic] substances laying about, and potpourri is usually purchased in stores.” This one is available online.
Our final news item of 2009 concerned the BBSRC-funded ‘robot scientist’ project, aimed at the automation of scientific reasoning (and experimentation), which made Time magazine’s ‘top ten scientific discoveries of 2009’.
Continue reading: A potpourri for 2010
One of last week’s meetings (that we co-sponsored) was an all-day discussion at the RAC Club on the future of agriculture and food production, organised and skilfully facilitated by Sir Ben Gill and entitled From a Land of Plenty to a Land of Uncertainty. Sub-themes were (i) the competing demands for land use, (ii) waste, and (iii) water. I mentioned waste a little last week, and so I shall devote some space here to water, a commodity that it is widely considered will be insufficiently available as the need for agricultural productivity increases through demographics exacerbated by climate change.
Continue reading: Water in agriculture and food, and of networks and genes
Following last week’s theme that focussed on elements of our European activities, one of my (pleasurable) tasks this week involved speaking at the ‘kick-off’ symposium at Noordwijkerhout of the Netherlands Consortium for Systems Biology, a virtual (i.e. geographically distributed) grouping of Dutch scientists interested in developing the Systems Biology Agenda. Some of their plans, e.g. for Systems Biology Centres, mirror quite closely our own activities, as originally set out in 2003 in our 10-year vision. There is also a recognition of the need to embed systems biology thinking in the scientific mainstream. An initiative that will be most helpful to all involves the production of Web-based materials to assist the multi-disciplinary learning required by those seeking to develop the necessary skills. I gave two talks, one on BBSRC’s activities in Systems Biology, including our contributions to European activities such as SysMO, ERASysBio and a bilateral joint funding programme with the French ANR, and a scientific or ‘academic’ one on the Systems Biology of transporters of pharmaceutical drugs, their role in the process of ‘attrition’, and how we need to embed them in the human metabolic network. The speaker just before me was Denis Noble, who had taught me at Oxford, and who gave, as usual, an insightful and deeply intellectual exposition of his thinking on the relationship between molecular genetics and systems biology, partly encapsulated in his splendid book The Music of Life, and pointing up a couple of recent reviews I had missed, one on the combinatorial properties of the interactions of gene products (one of my own pertains) and one on causation in Phil. Trans.
Continue reading: In touch with the Dutch
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