Because of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the blog had a week off. Among many other meetings was a very useful one with Sir John Beddington, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, and other Departmental Chief Scientists. These meetings provide excellent fora for developing scientific thinking across Government Departments, and certainly expose me to issues broader than those that I typically contemplate.

We were pleased to note the announcement (amid a welter of bad puns such as ‘tomato genome project bears fruit’, ‘sauce code’, and the like) of the sequences of two tomato genomes. Given the very widespread consumption of tomatoes, and their perceived health benefits, it will be most exciting to see how quickly this knowledge translates into strains with improved traits such as taste, anti-oxidant content, post-harvest longevity, disease resistance, and so on. (Incidentally, growing tomatoes in saline conditions can improve their taste, but not yield, considerably!) [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]