Last week involved a busy day at BIS presenting, with our Chair Professor Sir Tom Blundell, to the Triennial Review team, followed by two meetings chaired by David Willetts on Open Access (where there are some interesting developments in the US) and on aspects of the Agri-Tech strategy.

I then travelled to Boston, to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where I was presented with their Fellowship. This was a huge meeting, but a session I especially enjoyed was one on Visualising Science (including Dennis Meredith, Erik Olsen and Yael Fitzpatrick). William Press gave an excellent Presidential lecture, citing (as I have done) the work of Robert Solow in illustrating the ~30% return that investment in civil science and technology brings. Press also mentioned the work of Kenneth Arrow and Zvi Griliches, the fact that positive feedback (education breeds innovation breeds education…) is necessary to account for exponential increases in per capita incomes, and reciprocal shifts in the percentage of resource going on more fundamental and more applied research from public and private sources, respectively. All entirely applicable to the UK. [...]

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! [...]

Following the excellent settlement for the overall Research Base announced at the Comprehensive Spending Review, we are all now busy setting down the next draft of our so-called Delivery Plan, so this week’s blog will be comparatively short. One day last week involved a meeting with George Freeman, MP for mid-Norfolk and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture, as well as a reception (with all the Research Councils) for members of the new Parliament with an interest in Science and Technology, hosted by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Biologics are a significant part of our portfolio, and I attended a reception hosted by UCB who focus on their development in both the UK and Belgium. [...]