Last week, among many meetings in Swindon, saw one of our monthly meetings of the Research Council Chief Executives, including a very useful briefing from HEFCE Chief Executive Sir Alan Langlands about developments and thinking in the ‘other half’ of the dual-support system.

I spent a thoroughly enjoyable half-day at one of the periodic dissemination meetings of the Bioprocessing Research Industry Club (hashtag #BBSRCBRIC). Many first-rate and wide-ranging presentations (both oral and poster) covered everything from novel methods of membrane protein purification to flux balance analysis for predicting and improving recombinant protein productivity. On this latter, I was pleased to see the proofs of a paper to which I contributed, describing a new method for predicting metabolic fluxes – for instance for increasing them for industrial biotechnology. Not for the first time, I might comment that one can often go a very long way in silico, with minimalist but well-chosen experimental measurements to provide constraints! [...]

My first activity after the summer involved attendance, and a presentation (about our funding for biophysics, and some of my own biophysical science activities) at a thoroughly interesting meeting on “Physics meets Biology” organised in Oxford by the Institute of Physics. The main themes of biophysics, that I sought to reflect, included molecular interactions, the development and exploitation of novel instrumentation, and mathematical and computational analyses of biological systems (and the data that they can generate). Several excellent talks and posters also demonstrated the considerable progress being made in the design and performance of DNA nanostructures. According to our present codings, some £70M per year of current grants involve a biophysics component. [...]

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. [...]

The week began with a meeting attended by all the Chief Executives and some 800 staff of Research Councils UK at the Swindon STEAM museum (a splendid location celebrating the early days of the Great Western Railway), where we set down some of our collective thinking about a framework for the role of research in a productive economy, in a healthy society and in contributing to a sustainable world. BBSRC then had a senior Executive Away Day where we worked on our strategic thinking in a number of areas, including the delivery of our emerging Strategic Plan that we continue to develop following an extensive consultation phase. [...]

As announced on our website, I was pleased to participate last Tuesday (Jan 27) in the press briefing and formal launch of BSBEC, a nested acronym that stands for the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre. This is a virtual centre that represents a collaboration between a large number of research institutions and is part of the Research Councils’ Energy Programme. It involves a BBSRC investment of £20M with additional investments of £7M from industry, plus further contributions from the consortium partners.

The focus of a very exciting scientific programme is on the generation of bioenergy and transport biofuels from woody biomass and from waste materials that do not compete with food production for land (as do many so-called first-generation biofuels). The origins of this programme lay in a report from a Panel that I chaired for BBSRC, and in some of the analyses from the subsequent Gallagher report. [...]