Last week involved 2 days of interviews, on which announcements will be made in due course, the first for the Directorship of the John Innes Centre and the second for future members of Council. The latter is an annual event, and I would encourage readers of this blog to consider the best ways to make themselves and colleagues aware of the opportunities to join our Council. As someone who did previously serve on BBSRC Council for 6 years, I can certainly confirm that it is an interesting, illuminating and worthwhile activity.
Continue reading: Interviewing, international, and inspiring the next generation

As I start to write this, I am just returning on the Shinkansen to Tokyo airport from the 2009 Science and Technology in Society Forum held in Kyoto. Styled as ‘the Davos of Japan’, this meeting brought together some 600 CEOs and research leaders, including many Nobelists, to discuss the important role that Science has to play in solving the world’s problems, with global health and sustainable energy (including bioenergy) production very much to the fore. The breadth and depth of the discussions were profound.
Continue reading: Science and Technology in Society Forum 2009

Molecular biology, as does systems biology, relies heavily on the development of novel techniques for the study of biological systems and their subsequent exploitation. Thus, X-ray crystallography (Nobel Prize) for DNA structure determination (Nobel Prize), DNA sequencing (Nobel Prize), soft-ionisation mass spectrometry (Nobel Prize) for proteomics, PCR (Nobel Prize), and the Green Fluorescent Protein (and derivatives) for cell biology (Nobel Prize) have all revolutionized modern biology. In a similar vein, the discovery and use of restriction enzymes for molecular cloning (Lasker Prize) arguably initiated modern biotechnology. A considerable amount of BBSRC support continues to be aimed at basic molecular biology and biotechnology, and just last week we announced candidate swine flu vaccines produced using novel vectors, developed last year and this for rapid molecular engineering in plants, in the laboratory of George Lomonossoff and colleagues from the John Innes Centre. In this case the time from idea to exploitation was very swift, less than 2 years, but 15 years is more common!
Continue reading: Channelling biotechnological production by molecular engineering

Much discussion (including in this blog) has surrounded the question of the origin of the H1N1 influenza A variant(s) (‘swine origin influenza virus’ or S-OIV) involved in the recent outbreak, initially in Mexico, of swine flu. Is it ‘really’ swine flu or is it ‘really’ a form of bird flu that transmitted to swine, or what? A recent online publication by Smith et al., with the same title as that in the apodosis of this blog (apologies to George Gershwin for the protasis), describes work partly funded by BBSRC that sheds considerable light on the answers. This is especially timely given the raising by the WHO of the present outbreak to ‘level 6’ pandemic status.
Continue reading: It ain’t necessarily sow; the origins and evolutionary genomics of the 2009 swine-origin H1N1 influenza A epidemic

As highlighted in the latest issue of Nature Reviews in Drug Discovery, the incubation phase of a new Open Access platform called Sage (www.sagebase.org) should begin on 1 July, 2009. The aim of this initiative, led by Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt who are leaving Merck to run it, is ‘to integrate large-scale biological information into models and then enable other scientists to leverage that information in an open access way’. It starts with a large chunk of data and information (especially expression profiling data) that they bring to the party.
Continue reading: Sage has its time; a large-scale open access resource for systems biologists