As part of a truncated post-Easter week I had a very interesting meeting with Ketan Patel, author of a very interesting book and who I had met at the STS Forum last autumn. A particular focus was on sustainability and how to estimate the full environmental and economic costs of various strategies, especially in agriculture, bioenergy and industrial biotechnology.

Continuing that theme, I attended part of the very interesting BSBEC grantholders workshop, where excellent progress is being made in this large and wide-ranging programme in sustainable bioenergy.

I had a very interesting visit to Newcastle University, where I visited a number of centres including the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology, gave a talk about BBSRC strategy and also gave a scientific talk. I then returned south for a meeting by videoconference of the ‘Members’ (part of the new governance arrangements) of the John Innes Centre.
Continue reading: Sustainability, BSBEC, capital equipment and Newcastle

The report of the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures (GFFF) Group was released in January 2011, and I attended a One Year On meeting of its ‘High Level Stakeholder Group’ that looked  at the already considerable impacts it has had on both thinking and action (not least that of BBSRC). One of these is the appointment of a Food Security Champion, Professor Tim Benton, with whom I also had a useful catch-up on the very many activities that are going on in the Food Security space.

Food and agriculture, as well as Industrial Biotechnology, also figured largely in a meeting I had with Mary Creagh, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. Brazil is, of course, an agricultural superpower, and we had a very useful meeting with Professors Glaucius Oliva (Head of the CNPq funding agency) and João Carlos Teatini (Head of the CAPES agency, that mainly looks after graduate education). We already have many excellent links with Brazil, including a LabEx (laboratory exchange) scheme with the Agricultural Research agency Embrapa (and whose Head I also saw at the GFFF meeting); we now anticipate strengthening these further.
Continue reading: Food, agriculture, text mining, Brazil and manufacturing

My first external engagement last week was at a breakfast discussion organised by BP Biofuels around the issues of the economics, sustainability and utility of various kinds of biofuels, especially those based on the starch component of feed wheat (with the protein concentrate being used for animal feed). Chaired by Jonathan Dimbleby, It featured contributions from Dave Richards, Managing Director of Vivergo fuels, Jeremy Tomkinson of the National Non-foods Crop Centre, Peter Kendall – recently re-elected as President of the NFU, and Jonathon Porritt of Forum for the Future. There was much consensus that while electric vehicles may take over in time, liquid biofuels were going to be more important for a good while. (I do not understand why vehicles that use fuel cells to transform liquid fuels rather than dihydrogen to electricity are not discussed more, as these combine the high energy density of liquid fuels such as ethanol with the environmental benefits of electricity.) There was also considerable recognition that we need to be able to agree much more carefully how we assess the true sustainability of a bioprocess; indeed I see the research needs underpinning a transition to true sustainability being an important theme for BBSRC science and scientists as we move more fully to a BioEconomy. For these kinds of biofuels (but more generally), this would require good process data being made publicly available. The enormous Vivergo plant near Hull will certainly operate at considerable scale, with planned production of 420 million litres of bioethanol per year. Truly things have moved apace since the BBSRC Review on Bioenergy (PDF) that I chaired in 2006 and the UK is already well placed for making a major contribution to its sustainability in biofuels.
Continue reading: Biofuels, sustainability, open access and INRA

Last week I had a useful day at The Genome Analysis Centre, discussing the scientific opportunities for the Norwich Research Park and more generally. I also participated in part of a very interesting event on scientific storytelling, and some of the celebrations attendant on this year’s Diamond Jubilee winners of the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Higher Education, where a welcome number of the winners were from our BBSRC-funded community. We also had a very good meeting with Tim Wheeler and colleagues at the Department for International Development, with whom we already co-fund a number of programmes such as SARID, CIDLID and SCPRID.

Stephen Curry in his recent comments on Open Access (OA) raised some important points relating to OA and the Research Councils, quoting BBSRC as an example (in his opinion) of things not working as well as they should. Anyone who knows me will know that I am a very strong supporter of Open Access and of text and data mining. Indeed, I have blogged quite often about Open Access (and have been known to write scholarly articles such as this and this) on the subject. There is no doubt that significant aspects of my own scientific work would be made much easier if all papers were freely available, and it is straightforward to give examples in areas such as genome-based metabolic network reconstruction, text mining for systems biology, and pulling together disparate literatures and synthesising inductive knowledge in pharmacokinetics, medicine and toxicology.
Continue reading: Genomics, prizes, DFID and Open Access

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.
Continue reading: Food security, open access and mobile computing