After returning from the AAAS meeting that I described last week, we had one of our periodic meetings with the Directors and Deputy Directors of the Institutes that we fund strategically. This one was held at the Babraham Institute, where as usual an afternoon of scientific presentations and a laboratory tour was followed by a wide ranging agenda covering a variety of funding and strategic issues. We also had an excellent presentation on public dialogue from Sir Roland Jackson, Chair of our Bioscience for Society Strategy Panel.

With colleagues I also had a very useful meeting with Sir John Beddington, focussing mainly on the developing Agri-Tech strategy and our plans for Industrial Biotechnology. [...]