It is widely assumed that a General Election will be called for early May (and must in any event be called by early June), and one consequence is that all parts of Government, including ‘arms length bodies’ such as BBSRC, will, during the election period, have to follow strict rules to ensure they do not do anything that could be perceived as party political e.g. announcing new initiatives, commenting on activities etc.

In Whitehall this period is known as Purdah, and this means that my BBSRC blog will be suspended between the announcement of the General Election and the formation of a new Government.
Continue reading: Pharmaceuticals, Food, Biofuels and Purdah

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

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

We have recently completed the opinion-gathering phase of our consultation on Future Directions in Research Related to Food Security, and have initiated that on our 2010-2015 strategic plan and I will return to the outcomes of these in future blogs. One of the early thoughts received on the strategic plan is the suggestion that we should pay more explicit attention to our interfaces with the disciplines of chemistry, especially in the form of chemical biology, and it is certainly the case that chemical ideas underpin many of our own programmes, as well as some of the cross-cutting programmes of RCUK. Partly to this end, I spent part of last week at the latest (42nd) International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) meeting held in Glasgow. This was a huge event – some 2000 delegates – and chemical biology played a significant part I gave a talk on the systems biology of pharmaceutical drug uptake, as part of a symposium on The Chemistry-Biology Interface: Drug Targets and Diagnostics (noting, too, that natural products remain a significant source of novel drugs).
Continue reading: Chemical biology

One of the consequences of the flood of text and data increasingly available digitally is the need for effective means for summarising and visualising their content. One simple metric is based on the frequency of words (or indeed tags, such as those done collaboratively – a folksonomy), and a widely used visualisation device (a simple one based on tags is also used as a search device in these blog pages) is the word cloud or Wordle, in which frequency is encoded by the font size of a word. More sophisticated versions are based on text mining, and recognise phrases and terms rather than single words alone.
Continue reading: What’s in a name? A tag cloud of recent blogs