As with any organisation or system, its effective functioning requires much internal (as well as external) communication between and within our groups. Thus, most of my meetings last week were ‘internal’, including meetings of our Finance Group (that also includes things like Estates) and our Corporate Policy and Strategy Group. In addition, BBSRC is ‘home’ to the Research Councils Internal Audit Service (RCIAS) that – as you would suppose – provides internal audit and assurance services to the Research Councils and other bodies, and I had one of my regular meetings with its Director.

We also have interactions with many external organisations, and – related to a joint call in Synthetic Biology – we are hosting an official from the Defence Science and Technology Lab (DSTL), with whom I had a scientifically very interesting discussion.
Continue reading: Finance, assurance, policy and DSTL

Welcome back to all from the winter break, to the first blog of 2012!

As last year, I attended part of the Oxford Farming Conference, where I enjoyed many excellent talks, such as one from USDA Chief Economist Joe Glauber highlighting the economic benefits to be had from investment in agricultural R&D and another from the newly knighted Defra Chief Scientist Sir Bob Watson. In informal conversation I also discovered the existence (from a young OFC Scholar) of the Miscanthus Growers Group. There is no doubt that improved and sustainable agricultural productivity is very much back on the scientific and agricultural agenda.
Continue reading: Oxford Farming, synthetic biology and our hi-tech future

This week the blog and I are officially on holiday, which allows me to enjoy a few of my hobbies such as following the cricket via the splendid Cricinfo and the evening highlights programme (it is nice finally to see the England cricket team number one in the world, just like the UK’s biologists). I have also been catching up on my reading (including via my new ownership of a tablet computer that runs the free Kindle app).

I have much enjoyed reading a popular book on the history of Bayes’ rule; it is extremely well written, and makes the story thoroughly gripping, as indeed it is. I am an increasing fan of the Bayesian approach, and I am writing something about it over the summer. I also read a handy little book on Matrix Management, and (with computer simulation occupying a philosophically uncertain position between ‘theory’ and ‘experiment’) one on the epistemology of computer simulations.
Continue reading: Summer, cricket and Bayes

Last week began with a meeting of the Heads of Research Council of the G8 nations, the G8HORCs of the title. This is an annual meeting that moves between member nations, and this time was held in the UK at and near the University of Warwick. This was a very useful opportunity to hear, in a closed setting that allowed a degree of frankness, the thoughts of equivalent leaders of research funding agencies around the world. Many of the issues are common to us all, of course (the increasing costs of doing science, open access, data floods, upskilling our communities, etc.), but the opportunity to share solutions that work was both welcome and taken. Subra Suresh, the relatively new Head of the US National Science Foundation, stayed on for further meetings with the RCUK Chief Executives both as a group and individually, and this allowed a longer and deeper discussion.
Continue reading: G8HORCs, process technology and synthetic biology

We continue to maintain a serious interest in Open Science, which includes Open Access to data, to the literature and so on, driven by the recognition that new, different and potentially better kinds of (e-)science can emerge when one has digital access to such resources. Last week I attended a double header on these themes. The first was a Royal Society Open Science meeting, part of an enquiry the Society is carrying out into this space. Two sessions explored, respectively, ‘Why do Open Science?’ and ‘How to do Open Science?’. An evening meeting the same day held by the Foundation for Science and Technology explored the theme ‘Can better use be made of public data, for example in health research?’. The speakers were Paul Boyle, CE of the ESRC, Baroness (Onora) O’Neill of Bengarve, and Stephen Penneck, Director General of the Office for National Statistics. Paul gave a number of examples by which publicly available data, suitably anonymised, could give considerable insights into public health and epidemiological issues. One example was a study illustrating the role of environmental pollution in the incidence of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in Finland (a disease for which there is indeed significant evidence for the involvement of iron), while another showed the benefits of long-term studies (albeit assuming that statins work just via lowering LDL cholesterol, whereas much evidence suggests that they act more as anti-inflammatories). Baroness O’Neill covered the complex (and in some ways contradictory) legal issues surrounding the use of data, while Stephen Penneck took us through some of the many datasets that ONS is making freely available. I note too that my own recent presentation on Biofuels at the Foundation is now online, as is the latest analysis of the role of transporters in the cellular uptake of pharmaceutical drugs.
Continue reading: Open data, science and celebrations